Written on the Wind 9781838713522, 9781844574209

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Acknowledgments I am grateful to Rebecca Barden and the BFI Film Classics board for supporting the inclusion of this volume in the series. My thanks are also due to the anonymous BFI Classics readers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft, Sophia Contento at BFI Publishing, the British Academy for a grant enabling me to research archives in Los Angeles, Laura Mulvey for her encouragement and for refereeing my BA grant application, Jon Halliday for helpful comments and suggestions, the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (especially Barbara Hall), as well as the UCLA (especially Lauren Buisson) and USC (especially Ned Comstock) libraries, where I carried out most of the research for this volume. I also consulted material at the Queen Mary, University of London Library, the British Library, the British Film Institute Library, the University of Roehampton Library and the University of London Senate House Library. I am grateful and indebted to my colleagues in the Department of Film Studies, in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film, Queen Mary, University of London, as well as, more generally in the School, to Jill Evans and Rüdiger Goerner. Katie-Jane Hext, Ron Guariento, Andrea Sabbadini, Christopher Cordess, Carine Ronsmans, the Fulham film club, Prue Downing, Louise Riley-Smith, Philippa Hudson, Marta Rey and Carlos Troncoso also helped and encouraged me in various ways. Bruce Babington, my friend and collaborator over many years, and co-author of our publications that began with a 1990 Movie article on Sirk, ran his expert eye over an early draft and made many useful suggestions. Isabel, Tom, Jenni, Phil, Tabitha, Michael and family were a source of much-needed encouragement during the later stages of the writing of this book. Isabel’s insights and suggestions have been, as ever, indispensable. This book is dedicated to her.

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Overture: The Wind As a yellow 1953 Allard J2X hot rod driven by Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack) scorches through a Texan Monument Valley of derricks and telegraph poles, heading towards Hadley, an oil town, Frank Skinner’s portentous music, carried initially by predominantly brass instruments, warns of impending catastrophe, the ‘melos’ in the drama, in Charles Rosen’s words, ‘shaping our perceptions of a narrative’ (Rosen 2011: 11). Even before the medium shot of the reckless driver’s swig at a bottle of ‘raw corn’, the seventh in a montage of eight shots showing the car racing past from left to right, the doom-laden orchestral score followed by a song composed specially for the film bind together a dazzling sequence of sights and sounds to announce the film’s themes. Sirk’s brilliant matching of the vitality of form and morbidity of theme introduces his survey of a desperate class through a burst of furious cinematic energy unparalleled elsewhere in his work.

Racing through a hellish landscape

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Eventually, the driver halts his roadster at the entrance of the antebellum mansion (hired for exteriors by the studio from the gambling and uranium holdings millionaire, Samuel Kingston). The rapid but cheerless tempo of the opening bars yields to the slower, lilting melodic cadences and elegiac lyrics of the Victor Young–Sammy Cahn tune sung by the Four Aces, accompanying the credits and preparing the way for its first line, ‘A faithless lover’s Symbols of the ‘power elite’; Kyle driven by inner furies

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kiss’, delivered against the visual backdrop of a window frame, seen from outside the building. To the right, in the foreground, stands a dark-suited Mitch Wayne (Rock Hudson), his eyes staring pensively out of the frame and into the darkness beyond. The bottom left of the frame shows Lucy Moore/Hadley (Lauren Bacall), lying in bed, dressed in a cream-coloured negligee. The words, ‘A faithless lover’s kiss’, refer to infidelity, but the visual imagery is ambiguous: a woman – faithless or faithful? – moves to occupy centre frame. Whether, alternatively, the man looking out of her bedroom window is innocent or guilty of infidelity is also at this stage an open question. Played by Rock Hudson, already a Hollywood hero, whose name now appears on the screen, Mitch, unlike Lucy, and significantly wearing day clothes, seems an implausible betrayer, though later revelations confirm guilt of thought, even if not of word and deed. The camera’s position outside the window distances the viewer from the characters, and seems to frame them together in a world of airless hedonism, sheltered from nature’s windblown domain outside. The next verse, ‘Is written on the wind’, guides the viewer to a low-angle shot of the hot rod that comes to an abrupt halt in the

Mitch still framed by the Hadleys

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driveway, its offside headlamp, prominent in the frame, a giant eye serving as another of the film’s many lenses that peer into private and public worlds. Sirk’s (1897–1987) pre-Hollywood modernist heritage shines through here. The Surrealist tendency to stress the processes of perception (e.g. the assault on the eye in Un Chien andalou, 1928, or the eye-obsessed paintings of Dalí and Magritte) finds its more measured visual complements in these and later scenes. Here, Mitch’s troubled gaze out of the window, as if projecting his repudiation of the house and all it represents, mirrors the function of the car’s headlamp, beaming its slightly skewed probing light onto the audience, encouraging it to see clearly the complexities of the melodrama ahead.1 The driver alights and approaches the mansion, while the perspective now shifts to a medium shot of the bedroom interior, where Lucy attempts vainly to leave her bed, flopping down again, numbed and unable to face the brewing tragedy. Even when she does manage it, at the end of the scene, she collapses, as if swathed in what looks like a winding sheet, the billowing curtain of her luxurious morgue-like bedroom. Accompanying the words ‘A night of stolen bliss’ in the score, Lauren Bacall’s name appears, given the same size lettering as Hudson’s, and in line with her agent’s demands: Kyle’s roadster as dual symbol of petro-dollar luxury and perception

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Miss Bacall is to receive co-star credit in second position, her name to be preceded by the name of Rock Hudson. If Rock Hudson’s name appears above the title then Miss Bacall’s name must appear above the title; if Rock Hudson’s name appears below the title then Miss Bacall’s name must appear below the title … If Mr Hudson’s likeness is displayed in paid advertising, then Miss Bacall’s likeness must also be displayed. (Baur 1955: n.p.)

Even though, as Sirk comments (Halliday 1971: 116), Lauren Bacall was the film’s major star, her ranking was beginning to slip, and Hudson’s – since Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession (1953) overtaking hers at the box office – guaranteed superior billing. The emotional turmoil intensifies as Kyle walks along the side of the house, drunkenly hurling against the wall his empty bottle of ‘courage’ (the Cove bartender’s word). Robert Stack’s name now appears, synchronised with the last line of the song’s first stanza, a repetition of ‘Is written on the wind’. The song’s and the film’s title, inherited from Robert Wilder’s novel (1945), are also more remotely inspired by Catullus: ‘The woman I love says that there is no one whom/she would rather marry than me, not if Jupiter/Himself were to woo her; but what a/woman says to her ardent lover should be written in wind and running water’ (Catullus 1976: 150).2 The misogynistic tradition of the faithless woman is invoked, even if the studio publicity, ‘What a man tells a woman, and a woman tells a man, should be written on the wind’ (Anon 1956 b), distributes blame equally between the sexes. Although, as we later discover, Kyle’s groundless accusations against his wife echo the grievances of Catullus’ wounded lover, Sammy Cahn’s lyrics point in a slightly different direction. The words may animate Kyle’s thoughts about Lucy, his rescuer from inner demons conjured up almost certainly by the vicissitudes of a dysfunctional family and the equivocal privileges of untold wealth. With their allusions to nature, wind, dying leaves, dreams and memories, the lyrics also capture Mitch’s feelings for Lucy, and additionally, as in other wind-defined films such as Gone with the Wind (1939) or The Wind Cannot Read

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(1958), a more universal, elegiac awareness of the impermanence of all things. The shot that follows the lines ‘just like the dying leaves our dreams we’ve calmly thrown away’ ushers in Dorothy Malone’s name, at left of frame, as she approaches the window, her face dominating the shot in close-up, a shadow covering its lower half, neck and shoulders, her sly, inquisitive eyes stealthily assessing with barely concealed approval the wreckage caused by her malign handiwork. Marylee’s passion for Mitch leads to wanton sex and mischievous accusations, revealing through indiscretions the depths of her passion for him. As the sequence continues, shots alternate between views from outside the house, its walls and windows shadowed and framed by tree branches blowing wildly in the wind, and, from within, of Marylee and Kyle heading for the ground-floor study, the stage for a family tragedy. In the sequence’s last shot, as the Four Aces end their closeharmony song with the lines ‘What’s written on the wind/Is written in my heart’, ‘Douglas Sirk’ appears against the mansion’s gaping front door. The building lies open to the elements, invaded by swirls of

Marylee : ‘Enough devil in her …’

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shredded leaves and a howling wind. The atmosphere of erotic frustration trapping the four main characters points beyond their emotional torment to a world where the wind is Sirk’s dual metaphor for sexual desire and for nature at war with itself. According to the film’s scenarist George Zuckerman, this sequence was crucial as a selling point to exhibitors: ‘In the 1950s the exhibitors watched the opening minutes of a film, and they had to be hooked. Hooking the audience was secondary. The exhibitors were hooked, as were the audiences, and the film was a box office smash’ (Zuckerman in Bourget 1977–8: 27). The film broke records everywhere. For instance, the New Orleans Joy Theatre opening-day receipts amounted to $3,036 (compared with $1,927 for Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, 1954, and $2,222 for Magnificent Obsession). It outpaced the all-time record for The Glenn Miller Story (1954) and all other Universal-International films.

The Hadley mansion buffeted by the wind

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1 Production and Promotion While the narrative faintly echoes Reckless (1935) – though Sirk claims never to have seen the film (Halliday 1971: 115) – the resemblance of Written on the Wind to his own Slightly French (1948), with its focus on siblings and a sister’s passion for her brother’s close friend, is even more intriguing. Sirk recalls (Halliday 1971: 114) it was Albert Zugsmith’s idea to film Robert Wilder’s novel Written on the Wind. Zugsmith’s place in film history as a producer is down to the Sirk films and to Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958). Without these two credits, a reputation resting, say, on Sex Kittens Go to College (1960) and Fanny Hill (1964) would have been less secure. Intimations of a frivolous streak already surface in his approval of Marylee’s self-pleasuring dance with Mitch Wayne’s portrait in Written on the Wind, and his even more risqué suggestion that Dorothy Malone should dispense with underwear for her parachute jump in The Tarnished Angels (Halliday 1971: 120; Stern 1977–8: 30). According to George Zuckerman, Wilder’s novel had been shelved (bought at first by RKO in 1945, sold in 1946 to International and finally adapted in 1951 after International’s merger with Universal) mainly for two reasons: the Production Code Office’s objections to aspects of the story, and a threatened lawsuit by the Reynolds tobacco family, the presumed inspiration for the novel. Zachary Smith Reynolds (1911–32) was the heir to the family business. His fondness for aviation, and the mysterious circumstances of his death, recalls aspects of Kyle’s situation in Written on the Wind. Convinced a filmed version would be a box-office smash hit, Zuckerman persuaded Zugsmith and Ed Muhle, Head of Production at Universal-International, in more auspicious times, to take it on (Zuckerman in Bourget 1977–8: 27).

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In line with generic constraints, studio ideology, the creative team’s priorities, and tried and tested box-office formulae, Zugsmith dispensed with minor plot incidents and subsidiary characters. The latter have different first and family names, the plot is simplified and inserted into a mainly flashback structure. Jasper Hadley’s wife and brother have been eliminated, though both are mentioned at key moments in the film. Among the other significant alterations, Marylee is now much older than the novel’s fifteen-year-old Anne Charlotte (Dorothy Malone was thirty-one). In intensifying Marylee’s psychological damage, and in making her a fully grown woman, the film also manages – through the death of her father as an indirect result of her shameless promiscuity – to draw attention not only to women-centred questions but also to the shock applied to the conservative system through transgression of moral and social standards.3 The film’s Jasper does not shoot his daughter’s roughtrade pick-up and then himself. He acknowledges the comic futility of offering his wife’s surgeon a million dollars to prevent her from

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dying. His own downfall, as he tumbles headlong down the staircase, while his daughter begins her danse macabre to the deafening sounds of ‘Temptation’ on her turntable, seems like a heart attack prompted by shock and, perhaps, shame. The Hadley siblings have compromised the honour of the family by defying codes of morality and class, the brother’s drunkenness compounded by what the Production Code, the studio itself and several reviewers called his sister’s ‘nymphomania’. Kyle dies, not, as in the novel, by an act of suicide but accidentally when Marylee tries to prise away the pistol he intends to use on Mitch. In the film, Mitch and Lucy are paired off at the end. In the novel, as Reese (the film’s Mitch) and Lilith (Lucy) split up, recognising that her miscarriage and Cary’s (Kyle’s) death would always come between them, Anne Charlotte (Marylee) approaches Reese to deliver the novel’s penultimate lines: ‘Now, Reese,’ she said. ‘Don’t wait or think or wonder. There isn’t time. This is our last chance.’ The novel ends with the sentence: ‘He bent to kiss her and she was crying’ (Wilder 1946: 381). Zuckerman produced his first draft screenplay in 1955 (Zuckerman 1955 a). This retains some of the novel’s character names, such as ‘Reese’, and includes legends superimposed on the screen: ‘What a man tells a woman … And a woman tells a man … should be … written on the wind.’ The screenplay reads: ‘A night wind chases clouds past an autumn moon’ (Zuckerman 1955 a: 1). Only after a dissolve from this scene does it move on to Cary’s appearance in his roadster: ‘Whitfield [N.B. later ‘Hadley’] Oil Company. Behind the wheel of a Thunderbird is the lone, hatless figure of a man of thirty (superimposed titles and credits begin).’4 Dispensing with a lyrical opening, the revised final screenplay (Zuckerman 1955 b) prefers to cut to the chase. This now has the changed names of the characters – Lucy, Mitch, Marylee, Jasper, Kyle, Hoak – but it still begins in the more leisurely way eventually abandoned on screen. Whereas the released cut has eight shots of Kyle speeding towards the Hadley mansion, the revised final

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screenplay began with a silent scene: a full angle on the exterior of the house, showing leaves falling, followed by an exterior of a window, with the camera dollying into and holding Lucy and Mitch in the frame. Next a second-unit shot of Kyle driving, panning left with him, holding on the Hadley sign, abandoned in favour of the more dramatic sequence that was released. Equally significantly, the endings of the screenplays vary, but whereas neither the first draft nor the revised final versions bear much resemblance to the released cut, the ending of the revised final screenplay was retained. In the first draft, the screenplay reads: The door opens. Marylee enters. Shutting the door behind her, she glances about slowly and uneasily as if she felt the presence of ghosts. Then as she crosses toward the rough-hewn desk, she studies on the wall behind the desk, a portrait of Jasper Whitfield in which he is seated at the desk holding a letter opener. As she sits down in the chair behind the desk, she picks up the letter opener and unconsciously copies the pose in the portrait. She seems strangely possessed as she leans forward and presses the intercom buttons. Marylee (with inter-com): ‘This is Miss Whitfield. Would you all come into my office … please?’ She flicks the buttons again. Then she settles back into the pose of the portrait above and behind her with an awareness that she has found a much-needed, sheltering niche. Fade out. The End. (Zuckerman 1955 a: 125)

Compare this with the revised final screenplay, scene 358: Camera holds on a close shot of an oil painting behind the desk. It depicts Jasper Hadley seated at his rough-hewn desk. The mood of quiet reflection is accented by a miniature, solid gold oil derrick held in his right hand. Camera pulls back, and holds on Marylee at the desk. Her sobbing subdued now, she absently picks up the miniature derrick and unconsciously settles with the pose of the portrait above and behind her, even to the degree of achieving the mood of quiet reflection. (Zuckerman 1955 b: 127)

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In the revised final screenplay, two final scenes show Lucy and Mitch in the car, waving goodbye to Bertha the housekeeper, as the gates are shut by Sam, Bertha’s husband. A couple of features of this attempt at an ending deserve attention: the letter opener, and the instructions given over the intercom to her employees by Marylee. The letter opener in the draft itself, like the derrick in the revised final version in Marylee’s possession, is readable as a symbol of transferred virility from father to daughter. Even though her inheritance may encourage – though nothing is certain – substitution of unhealthy attachment to Mitch Wayne with commitment to professional duties as a business woman, we are still expected to wonder how successfully she will manage to free herself from the introjected work-centred patriarchalism and failed social engineering that led to so much misery in the lives of the Hadleys. Marylee seems destined to remain a prisoner of a hellish Texan Huis clos. Fassbinder, among Sirk’s most fervent admirers, playing on Hudson’s first name, is not alone in reading Marylee’s stroking of the ‘rock’ in her hand (Fassbinder 1972: 98) as an ironic act of sexual frustration. She cradles a symbol, not a real man. Sirk, though, relates the derrick and portrait to the wider concerns of the film: I added that well – another sign from the whole film – and the portrait, and the whole desk. That’s the way it ended. But then later, long after shooting, Hudson’s agent, I believe, complained about that. So we shot them driving away from the house. It doesn’t hurt the film too much. (Stern 1977–8: 33)

Whether or not these details are attributable to Sirk, their inclusion in the revised final screenplay is significant. The film dispenses with Marylee’s intercom request, a distraction from the silent visual rhetoric of her isolation and despair, and prefers to the letter opener the combined phallic and oil-related significance of the derrick. Moreover, as the film belongs not only to Marylee, so a shot of Lucy and Mitch together leaving the mansion – whether or not dictated by Hudson’s agent – satisfies box-office demand for a happy

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ending (of sorts) and refers back to Lucy’s appeal to Mitch after Kyle’s assault: ‘Take me away, Mitch. Take me out of this house.’ A familiar Sirkian touch illustrating through the mise en scène of the house the oppression of family life, the scene recalls the end of Sleep My Love (1947), where Bruce Elcott (Robert Cummings) reassures Alison Courtland (Claudette Colbert) in the film’s last line that ‘In a little while we’ll be out of this house for ever’. The ending deliberately resists cohesion. The neatness of pairing the compatible lovers, and the redirection of Marylee’s energy, leaves gaps in the film’s artificial closure. Will the emotional turbulence endured by the characters be so easily stilled? For someone driven out of herself by love and made frantic with despair, the prospect of a return to some semblance of normality seems remote. As Laura Mulvey puts it, ‘the strength of the melodramatic form lies in the amount of dust the story raises along the road’ (Mulvey 1977–8: 54). Several drafts of the screenplay were submitted to Geoffrey M. Shurlock, the Director of the Production Code Office at the time, between 13 May 1955 and February 1956. The Office’s main grumble concerned the portrayal of Marylee as a ‘nymphomaniac’: ‘We indicated that it would be essential to change entirely the Marylee: bitter consolation

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characterization of Marylee, who now appears as a nymphomaniac throughout’ (Shurlock 1955 a). The objection is repeated in a letter dated 7 November 1955 (Shurlock 1955 b). Shurlock develops the point by insisting: Such a detailed portrayal of a nymphomaniac would be, we believe, unacceptable from the standpoint of the code in as much as it gets inescapably into the forbidden area of an inference of sex perversion. Therefore, it would be necessary to change this girl’s character entirely before the finished picture could be approved. (Shurlock 1955 b)

Two further objections related to the ‘overemphasis’ on drinking and ‘some unacceptable scenes of brutality … specifically the scene where the husband kicks his pregnant wife in the belly’ (Shurlock 1955 b). The screened version changes Lucy’s complaint to Mitch that Kyle has kicked her to ‘He hit me’, but the drinking scenes, like many other contentious episodes, survive more or less intact. Protests about the use of words like ‘hell’ are ignored. And, however unsatisfactory the term ‘nymphomaniac’ as a description of Marylee, part of her life remains driven by a sexual fixation, uttering lines like ‘I am filthy, period’ in response to Kyle’s accusation ‘You are a filthy liar’, and her promise to ‘have Mitch, marriage or no marriage’. Shurlock’s request to William Gordon, Director of Public Relations at UniversalInternational at the time (21 November 1955), for a ‘line or two of condemnation for her (Marylee’s) immoral behavior, as such a voice for morality is missing from the script and it would be very helpful to have it in the finished picture’ (Shurlock 1955 c: 2) was ignored. In the mid-1950s, as respect for the Production Code was in decline, and as Hollywood was beginning to test the limits of allowable screened material, Written on the Wind kept company in this respect not only with its contemporaries like Tea and Sympathy (1956), Peyton Place (1957) and Picnic (1955) but also with European films like Et Dieu … créa la femme (1956), as well as contemporary novels and plays that touched on strong or taboo

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subjects. As Barbara Klinger (1994) argues, Universal-International took advantage of the freer attitudes towards sex, largely ignoring Production Code directives as it sensed a sex-driven box-office triumph. The studio promoted the film, often in publicity provocatively referred to as ‘WOW’, as ‘adult drama’: A matured Hollywood has begun producing adult dramas based on outspoken themes which, a decade ago, might not have been approved for or by film audiences … Written on the Wind [is] a penetrating exploration of the morals and animal desires of four people constricted by cross relationships … A story of violence and physical corruption within a family in the most revealing detail. (Anon n.d. b)

These 1950s films reveal the tensions of a society in transition. Historians and sociologists have increasingly questioned the monolithic description of 1950s America as one-dimensional. Challenging contemporary and later views that perpetuated the notion of ideological complacency (e.g. Wright Mills 1981), historians have more recently described the country as a society in flux, the seedbed of 1960s movements of liberation. Wini Breines (1992) argues that the 1950s prepared the ground for the 1960s second-generation feminists. The view that Americans in influential positions were too concerned with the Red Menace (Whitfield 1991) has been contested by historians such as Douglas Tallack (1991), who draw attention to intellectual currents resisting conformity. Written on the Wind, like all Sirk’s 1950s films, is clearly readable as a barometer of the country’s winds of social change. Shooting started on 28 November 1955, and the film was unofficially released in selected cities (Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans and Tulsa) on 25 December 1956, making it eligible for the upcoming Academy Awards.5 The final budget amounted to $1,162,320, $78,000 over the original estimate, largely down to shooting over schedule and underestimated costs for set construction, action props, wardrobe, labour, extra ‘talent’ and other

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miscellaneous expenditure. Sirk was paid $28,000, Zugsmith $7,500, Hudson $27,000, Bacall $100,000 ($10,000 for ten weeks guaranteed), Stack $50,000 (six weeks guaranteed) and Malone $27,500. Unlike the other three principals, Hudson was contracted to Universal-International. Lucy’s wardrobe cost $7,950, Marylee’s $7,000, Mitch’s $1,855 and Kyle’s $1,550. The original actors pencilled in for three of the key roles were Jeff Chandler for Mitch, John Forsyth for Kyle and Barbara Rush for Marylee, but the film seems inconceivable without the stars who actually played them. Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone were nominated for Oscars for Best Supporting players, Malone going on to win the award. The promotional campaign covered every possible angle, from standard ideas – such as TV trailers, radio spots, giant cards, Dorothy Malone lookalike contests, balloon stunts, window displays in record shops of the Four Aces, layouts of Dorothy Malone’s ‘torrid’ dance – to less inspiring ones like publicising the Midwestern Association of Truck Drivers’ award to Rock Hudson as the winner of its first annual award for famous former truckers. The truckers’ accolade was a bonus for a studio convinced of the film’s primary appeal to women audiences: It was our feeling that Written on the Wind, to get its fullest potential audience, should be largely geared to woman appeal particularly in view of the popularity of Rock Hudson with women and to a lesser extent Bob Stack – neither of whom to the best of our knowledge have [sic] a negative reaction among men. (Anon 1956 c)

Matinee performances were 70 per cent women, evenings 50 per cent. The direction of the film was entrusted to Douglas Sirk, because his ‘expertness with romantic and psychological drama has marked him as one of Hollywood’s most sensitive directors’ (Anon n.d. c).

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2 Realism, Modernism and Melodrama Written on the Wind exemplifies the lavish style and penetrating insights of a director whose critical reputation over the last thirty years or so has caught up with the enormous box-office popularity that some of his films enjoyed at the time of their first release. Sirk’s films have attracted attention ever since favourable reevaluation in Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s. Initially discussed through concentration on unifying threads of form and content as examples of auteurism, Sirk’s films subsequently became from the 1960s onwards the focus of Marxist, feminist and psychoanalytical criticism. Hailed by Marxists as critiques of bourgeois ideology, they were viewed by some feminists as welcome attempts to prioritise the reality of women’s lives and, by others, as questionable intrusions in a ‘female’ genre. Psychoanalytical criticism has often focused on questions of positioning, identification and desire. A left-wing intellectual with a background in Germany in writing, painting and theatre, as well as in cinema, Sirk brought an exile’s unflinching eye to survey the private and public landscapes of contemporary American society in a variety of genres. Taza, Son of Cochise (1953), a Western, Sign of the Pagan (1954), an epic, Weekend with Father (1951), a comedy, Sleep My Love (1947), a thriller, Slightly French, a musical and, above all, what he referred to as the ‘melodrama’ handed to him by his studio bosses, demonstrate his embrace of Hollywood. These films balance realism with what a favoured author, Willa Cather, defines as the modernist’s subordination of realism to imagination, of enumeration to suggestion (Cather 2006: 8). Written on the Wind engaged its contemporary audiences primarily through character and narrative. Like all Hollywood films, its mode is realism: the audience identifies itself, above all, with the trials and tribulations of plausible characters whose actions are

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governed by principles of cause and effect. The realist aspects of Sirk’s melodramas have at times been neglected through consideration of their mannerist form derived from his high-art heritage. These deserve more attention, though, naturally, not at the expense of their inimitable formal exuberance, often referred to as their ‘excess’. In Written on the Wind, the prose of character and narrative combines with the transformative poetry of decor, colour, lighting, music and the hyperboles of performance to facilitate Sirk’s emphasis on the artifice of film and underlying assumptions in the creation of his melodrama’s illusions of reality. As Steve Neale (2000: 179–204) notes, ‘melodrama’ was used as a convenient label by Hollywood to define action films crossing generic boundaries; but, since the 1970s, critical and theoretical concerns with gender, psychoanalysis and ideology have appropriated it to refer, above all, to the pulsating emotions of family-centred dramas, often prioritising female protagonists. Attempts at defining screen melodrama have routinely privileged Sirk’s films, invariably highlighting aesthetic strategies that undermine the surface meanings and ideological infrastructure of the films.6 While no comprehensive account of his melodramas has emerged, the focus in Written on the Wind on the family, its ornate form, avoidance of a spare, laconic style, and pivotal dependence on a key feature of Euripidean drama – an individual’s ‘pacifying death by taking the place of another’ (Sirk in Halliday 1971: 95) – give the film some of its distinctively Sirkian ‘melodramatic’ features. Sirk’s reference to Alcestis is made in a discussion of Magnificent Obsession, where Dr Phillips’s death is exchanged for Bob Merrick’s (Rock Hudson) survival. But the theme of sacrifice is not confined to Magnificent Obsession. In All That Heaven Allows, for instance, her husband’s death before the start of the film enables his widow Cary (Jane Wyman) and Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson) to pursue a Thoreauvian life together in defiance of New England suburban pieties. In Written on the Wind, Jasper and Kyle are the sacrificial victims whose deaths allow Mitch an escape route from the Hadleys, and his sister Marylee to take on a new role,

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however ultimately circumscribed, as a professional woman. Kyle’s sacrifice, though, is shrouded in characteristic irony: we wonder whether Marylee would have preferred his survival and uninterrupted marriage to Lucy, leaving her free to hope for Mitch’s eventual capitulation to her overtures of love, rather than to mourn his death and assume the running of Hadley Oil. A blend of realism and modernism (though in its more accessible 1950s Hollywood variant), Written on the Wind reaches the summit of Sirk’s achievements in the portrayal of troubled characters. As in his other Universal-International melodramas, he was given a relatively free hand to leave his own mark on clunky narratives. Although resisting a simplistic archaeological model of psychology, he nevertheless points to childhood causes of unhappiness – what Larkin more prosaically refers to in the famous line ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’ – in his focus on family warfare, sibling relations, the bonds of love and friendship, endemic human violence, and class aspirations or resentments. The damaged principals act out of deep-seated needs fuelled by destructive impulses pushing them to the outer limits of self-abasement, with little regard for the consequences, relying on dependencies like ‘By whom was your brother killed?’

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alcohol and casual sex to deflect their pain or to rage against their fate. They often also turn to a fantasised past as the only escape route from the hellish captivity of the present. The imagery of hell, inspired by the Hadley/Hades link, and imbricating the dialogue with comments like Mitch’s description of Lucy as ‘going through hell’, is matched by perpetual allusion to captivity (e.g. Lucy’s remark to Mitch that her predecessor was ‘paroled’, and Kyle’s observation to Lucy that she has ‘too much brains for a trap like that’). The characters are immobilised by the past, two of them, Lucy and Mitch, managing largely to accommodate themselves to it, having no real quarrel with the ideological status quo, while the other two, Kyle and Marylee, memorable examples of Sirk’s ‘broken’ characters (Sirk in Halliday 1971: 67), are the fixated victims of a conflicted heritage. In some of Sirk’s films – e.g. a melodrama like There’s Always Tomorrow (1956) or a comedy like Weekend with Father – the children’s socialisation belongs to a pattern of conformism and the perpetuation of life-denying impulses. In Written on the Wind, parental influence leads not to willing accommodation with the ideological status quo but to wild and incoherent reproaches. In that respect, the film belongs to the decade’s mood of revolt, reflected in the products not only of popular (e.g. Rebel without a Cause, 1953) but also of high culture in, for instance, Death of a Salesman (1949) and The Catcher in the Rye (1951), all featuring protagonists as the lost or damaged offspring of confused or overbearing parents. It concentrates on the family as a microcosm for the enactment of the social and psychological dynamics of 1950s America, and the failed experiment of what Talcott Parsons, the pre-eminent American sociologist of the time, refers to as the two primary functions of the family: the socialisation of the children in preparation for their useful contribution to society, and the ‘stabilisation’ of the personalities of the adult members of that society (Parsons 1982: 192). Sirk’s achievement in Written on the Wind, through shining regular cameraman Russell Metty’s harsh light on a mise en scène of

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characters riven by class and psychology, is to engage the emotions and intelligence through sharp observation. The hard colours he relies on to represent the violence of the suffering Hadley children (Sirk in Shivas 1979) seem not only inspired by his modernist heritage but also, as Truffaut suggests, by more contemporary trends. Truffaut calls Written on the Wind a ‘photo novel’, its colours described as belonging to ‘the twentieth century, [featuring] the colours of the luxury civilization, the industrial colours that remind us that we live in the age of plastics’ (Truffaut 1978: 149). The blend of plastic and modernist hues on the palette of Written on the Wind justifies Laura Mulvey’s claim that Sirk is a ‘supreme stylist of the cinema’ (Mulvey 2001: 3). In contrast to other melodramas where, as some argue (Nowell-Smith 1977; Elsaesser 1987), the mise en scène subverts the narrative’s mechanisms of censorship, Written on the Wind moderates affirmation with irony.7 The feebleness of the patriarchs, Hoak Wayne (Harry Shannon) and Jasper Hadley (Robert Keith) – the former a living fossil, the latter a pillar of society lost to his work – and the pyrrhic victory of the daughter who reluctantly emerges from a cocoon of a hopeless passion expose the crumbling edifice of a degenerate society as well as the dubious

Father and son: Hoak and Mitch Wayne

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consolations of a life offering career-defined rather than more intimate sources of happiness. The fateful course of the siblings’ scarred lives seems like a reflection of 1950s America, reaching its limits, exposing beneath the pre-war superficial stabilities and certainties the challenges and erosions of parental authority. Sirk’s impressions of the decade have never been given a more vivid setting than in the mise en scène of Written on the Wind.

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3 Mise en scène Mise en scène is recognised as one of the most striking features of a Sirk film.8 The pastoral seclusion of Ron Kirby’s home in All That Heaven Allows, Helen Phillips’s Swiss retreat in Magnificent Obsession, Lora Meredith’s plush stage-set-like apartment in Imitation of Life (1959) and the war-scarred ruins of A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958) reflect Sirk’s painterly, theatrical sensibility and provide indispensable silent commentary on the action. Written on the Wind’s decor, a key element of its mise en scène – highlighting its value as an expression of personality – was used in publicity. A 19 January 1956 memo from Lou Jones on the work of one of the two set decorators, Julia Heron, reads: No matter how much you spend on your home, if it is not decorated correctly to match your personality, size, shape, and colouring then you can look like a slob in a $100,000 mansion. This is the opinion of Julia Heron, one of Hollywood’s few female set decorators who did all the interiors for Universal-International’s Written on the Wind … Just as you could look out of place in your own home if the interiors are all wrong, so can stairs and for this reason every phase of a set is carefully planned to fit in with the personality of the star, but also the dramatic highlights of the plot. Because Dorothy Malone is a statuesque blonde with blue-green eyes, Miss Heron backgrounded her with pastel shades. She avoided angular shapes in furnishings, because Miss Malone is tall, and also chose drapes and all furniture that would set off the beauty of the actress, but at the same time pinpointing the dramatic moment of the story. This particular home also has to look ostentatious, because of the wealth of the family, and here Miss Heron had to deliberately use some bad taste. (Jones 1956)

Heron’s decor, coupled with Alexander Golitzen’s sets, gives Written on the Wind a sheen that provides a fitting aesthetic context

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for characters now luxuriating, now suffocating, in the private landscapes of the Hadley domain. The categorisation of setting by Charles and Mirella Affron (1995: 37–40) under the headings of denotation, punctuation, embellishment, artifice and narrative has helped sharpen discussion of the relations between character and space in film. While agreeing with Bordwell that character usually takes precedence over space, the Affrons question the extent to which this is true of all films (Affron and Affron 1995: 35). Sirk’s exemplify all of the categories identified by the Affrons, and while, like all films, their settings obviously denote (e.g. to signpost genre) and punctuate (to serve the purposes of the narrative), the categories of embellishment (self-consciousness) and artifice (deployment of fantastic or theatrical imagery) demand special attention. The Hadley New York office The setting that directly follows the credit title sequence, as time is rolled back to 1955 and to the beginning of the events that led to Kyle’s death, is the Hadley New York office, the first of several workplaces that also include the Hadley building interior, the Cove, the diner, the petrol station where Marylee picks up her roustabout, and the courtroom, where Mitch is cleared of Kyle’s murder. Some of these settings also serve as places of leisure. The Hadley New York advertisement department office is a typical example of 1950s design: all straight, clear lines and metallic textures. But this is no dehumanised The Apartment (1960)-style open-plan office. The executive secretary enjoys her own space, a mise en scène that moderates the consumerist society’s fusion of product and image with subtle gestures to high culture. The room is spacious, its clarity reminiscent of Richard Hamilton pictures, its rectangular shape divided into a number of frames-within-frames: windows that look out onto the Manhattan cityscape, and pin-like perpendicular columns that intersect the overall space.9 The inner frames include a number of promotional posters for Hadley Oil, as well as a pseudo-Miró picture – one of eleven oil paintings by Mischa

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Kallis, Universal-International’s advertising art director – that hangs near the office door, beside which stands Mitch Wayne, Jasper’s surrogate son, the geologist working for Hadley Oil, admiring the elegant, expensively black patent leather-shod feet of the woman closed off from his view. The pseudo-Miró, kept in focus as Mitch stares at Lucy’s legs, is partly decorative, an item of consumerist value in an organisation governed by profit motives, but also a Sirkian nod to his ‘Athenian’ audience, drawing attention away from the company’s dedication to ‘power’ and ‘speed’, highlighted in the posters, to an underworld of opaque desires hinted at through the inclusion of a Surrealist painting. The shots of Lucy’s hands and legs, the former seen in close-shot only by the audience, the latter through Mitch’s point of view, conflate Mitch’s fetishistic voyeurism with the audience’s, and restore Sirk’s credits sequence focus on perception. Lauren Bacall’s hands and other attributes, somewhat crassly referred to by the studio’s publicity department copywriter, are deployed in the scene’s wider concerns with sexual attraction: Director Douglas Sirk, who thinks Lauren Bacall has the most expressive hands in Hollywood, has arranged for the svelte beauty’s first shot in Universal-International’s Written on the Wind to be Lauren’s hands only. Determined to display Miss Bacall’s charms little by little in all their glorious individuality Sirk’s second shot of the glamor girl is of her legs – Rock Hudson eyeing them. (Anon 1956 a)

Bacall’s hands, as discreetly expressive as a Madonna’s in a Leonardo or Raphael picture, often appear for various effects in close-up, as when Lucy covers her face in horror after Jasper Hadley’s tumble down the stairs to his death. In the office scene, apart from their contribution to the film’s interest in the sparks of desire, they are the viewer’s introduction to Lucy as a refined and, at this point in her life, self-assured professional woman of taste and class. Her long alabaster-coloured graceful fingers and her transparently varnished nails contrast with the texture and colours of the objects she touches.

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Lauren Bacall’s ‘expressive hands’; the executive secretary’s office decor

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In the sober geometric surroundings of her workplace, reflected in the grey – but smart – conventionalised office secretary’s blouse and tailored skirt, Lauren Bacall’s hands, seen here making notes on her desk diary, naturally draw attention to her work. Like other screen secretaries, she represents the working woman, not in Written on the Wind – as, say, in Phantom Lady (1944) – taking the initiative as an investigator, but occupying a position important enough to warrant her own office.10 Lucy’s character is even further nuanced through costume by the addition of a pair of black leather opera gloves worn in the cab ride she takes with Mitch on the way to ‘21’. Opera gloves, later also improbably worn by Marylee on the fatal night of her date with the petrol pump attendant, were fashionable items inspired by a Christian Dior ‘New Look’ favoured by other 1950s stars, including Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). They emphasise Lucy’s ‘class’ – regardless of her position as a secretary – and, along with the rest of her outfit, led Almodóvar, one of Sirk’s most devoted recent admirers, to remark: Douglas Sirk is … a great movie-maker. He’s a master of the art of narration: using colour and creating atmosphere with light and sets. There’s no point in telling him a secretary would not dress like that. He doesn’t care. He’ll dress her as he likes and he tells you much more about what’s happening than he would if the secretary were dressed normally. (Vidal 1988: 199)11

Simple-minded pleasures at ‘21’ Mitch persuades Lucy to accompany him to ‘21’ to meet Kyle, Mitch’s ‘simple-minded’ playboy heir to the Hadley fortune, who has used the excuse of a supposed business meeting to fly all the way from Texas for ‘the best steak sandwich’ in New York. During the cab ride to the club their relationship begins to flourish. Costume initially divides them: while Lucy is dressed in grey, Mitch’s suit and tie are brown. Increasingly drawn to her, Mitch gently touches Lucy at one point, as if in acknowledgment of shared views, one of many visual and verbal gestures that prepare the

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audience for their eventual pairing after Kyle’s death. In response to Mitch’s sarcastic remark that her involvement with Kyle might lead to her picture in the papers, she retorts acidly: ‘Is that all you live for?’ MITCH

Guess again, Miss Moore.

LUCY

I just wanted you to understand how I feel about such things.

MITCH

Know something?

LUCY

What?

MITCH

Maybe we’re two of a kind.

Their tentative attraction to each other as they speak the lines confirms, through additional matching smiles, the semantics of the dialogue as the scene dissolves to ‘21’. There, this atmosphere of restraint is replaced by one of hedonism created by the sight of Kyle seated next to two attractive women – decked out, unlike Lucy, whose neck is bare, with necklaces, their nails not transparent but carmine-bright, their overall appearance indicating they are no executive secretaries – and the sound of his commanding voice summoning the waiter, ‘Harry!’12 As a prelude to the entrance of Mitch and Lucy, the short exchange with the women reveals Kyle’s mixed feelings towards his friend: GIRL 1

Who’s this friend we’re waiting for?

KYLE

Mitch Wayne, my sidekick.

GIRL 2

Where do his millions come from?

KYLE

He’s eccentric; he’s poor … Mitch is just a country boy. The kind of assets he’s got you can’t buy with money.

The description of Mitch as someone with assets beyond price allows Sirk another poke at the materialism of a culture that in Oscar Wilde’s words knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Even more interesting are vocabulary and phrases that, while seeming to praise Mitch, serve only to bury him: ‘just a country boy’, ‘eccentric’, and even ‘sidekick’, the inferior buddy; Mitch as

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Tonto to Kyle’s Lone Ranger. All these reveal barely hidden teeming resentments, an impression strengthened when Kyle rises to greet Mitch and his companion. Uncouthness is added to hauteur when he stubs out a cigarette in his champagne glass, recalling the act of another vulgarian, Mrs Van Hopper’s (Florence Bates) extinguishing of her cigarette in her cleansing cream in Rebecca (1940). As Kyle joins Mitch and Lucy in the frame, Sirk’s shifting patterns in the relations between this trio show Kyle now through grey colourcoding closer to Lucy (Mulvey 2001), as Mitch’s conspicuous brown suit makes him the odd man out. The contrast between Mitch’s perhaps slightly quaint exemplary manners, illustrated by his chivalrous references to Lucy as ‘Miss Moore’, and Kyle’s brusque treatment of her is underlined by his inference, projecting onto Mitch his own treatment of women (‘Your taste is improving’), that she is only the latest of Mitch’s pick-ups. Largely intended as a joke, the remark barely manages to contain a storm of envy and resentment. Stealing Lucy away from him may be partly justified on the grounds that all’s fair in love and war, but it is also an assault on Mitch, fuelled by Kyle’s desire to undermine his sidekick, his supposed best friend, imposed on him since childhood by a father contemptuous of his own son, and whom he constantly measures by the standards of the invited cuckoo in the Hadley family nest, so sarcastically invoked when Kyle welcomes Lucy to the ‘happy, happy industrial Hadley family’. Kyle’s love/hatred of Mitch has led to a kind of dementia vividly captured in Robert Stack’s performance. His intense, glaring eyes give him a slightly manic air, heightened by a characteristically mirthless smile, a look formed by decades of pain, honed by parental rejection and the ravages of a dissolute life led as compensation for self-disgust. Here, Kyle’s double-focused verbal onslaught on Mitch, a major source of his furies, leads to a barrage of comments, snide remarks combined with interruptions, aimed at impressing Lucy, either to silence or to humiliate his rival. His further attempts to drive a wedge between Lucy and Mitch include flash talk of luxury, hedonism and

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lavish expenditure. He promises her membership of the Kyle Hadley society for the prevention of boredom, substituting pleasures such as ‘a guided tour through the gossip columns around the world in eighty headlines’ for duties, unaware that only a few moments earlier she had expressed a shared contempt with Mitch for celebrity. The film exposes the contradictions of an ideology that endorses worldly as well as naive pleasures. The significance of Lucy’s role as a woman hovering between professionalism and domesticity resonates beyond the limits of this film to epitomise the 1950s ideal of the home-loving girl who aims, as she says, to ‘walk down an aisle and wind up in a suburb, with a husband, mortgage and children’. Written on the Wind is Sirk’s meditation on the difficult choices, career or family, urban or suburban lifestyles, available to 1950s women. By 1960 the population of America was equally divided between suburbs and cities (Norton et al. 1994: 930). Reasons for this pattern included racism – the flight by white families from neighbourhoods newly populated by black immigrants from the rural south – the pollution of the city, the desire for gardens, the possibility of exerting local political influence and of raising families in safe environments (Norton et al. 1994: 930). The conflict for women between work and home was further enlivened by the publication in 1946 of Spock’s Baby and Child Care, which stressed the overriding importance of a maternal presence in a child’s upbringing. Debates between pro- and anti-feminist opinion-makers – the former exemplified by Margaret Mead, who stressed the arbitrariness of gender roles, the latter by, for instance, Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg (1947), who advocated traditional attitudes towards the role of women as mothers in the family – were carried out in the context of a backlash against women who during the war had taken jobs traditionally reserved for men. The female workforce, admittedly largely occupying positions as secretaries, clerks and nurses, had risen from 17 million in 1946 to 32 million in 1970. In 1944, 40 per cent of employed women were single, 45 per cent married, 15 per cent widowed or divorced; in 1950, 30 per cent were single, 50 per cent

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‘Maybe we’re two of a kind’; Kyle with two friends at ‘21’; Kyle pulls rank on Mitch

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married; in 1955, 25 per cent were single, 55 per cent married (Norton et al. 1994: 935). For all her protestations, Lucy is compromised no less than others by inconsistency. Her framing in two-shots with Kyle, as Mitch is isolated in single shots, points to her growing seduction by Kyle’s talk of pleasure-seeking. His temporary advantage over Mitch occurs when, on the pretence of asking him to buy some cigarettes – another example, of course, of the social inequality of the two men – Kyle hails a cab, leaving Mitch stranded, as he and Lucy head for the airport. When she says ‘don’t look now, but you have lost your friend’, Kyle replies ‘you advertising people, so clever with words’, hoping to make further headway with her by refining his earlier flattery at ‘21’ that a woman with her beauty and brains could not settle for the traps of domesticity. And yet, those are exactly what he will offer her in the end. Her occupation of Mitch’s position in her two-shot with Kyle in the back seat of the cab, however, points to her eventual union with Mitch. Flying down to Miami Meanwhile, extravagant pleasures – a joyride in Kyle’s Douglas DC3 down to Miami, followed by flowers, purses, dresses, hats and other glossy women’s magazine essential items showered on her in the Aladdin’s cave of a luxury hotel – delay eventually more durable gestures of commitment. Shots of the hotel interior are prefaced by a nocturnal view of the building and its surroundings. The effect of its partially lit areas – coloured window rectangles studded within the larger frame of the hotel – recalls pictures by Mondrian, such as his 1918 Composition with Gray and Light Brown. The modernist pictorial effect continues once the camera moves inside the hotel itself, although now the faintly dream-like ambience seemingly leans on the American variant of Surrealism (Halliday 1971: 73) – in films, the toned-down texture of, say, Spellbound (1945), not its convulsive European art movie forms such as Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou (1929) – more than the

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neo-plasticism of Mondrian. In Has Anybody Seen My Gal? (1952), ‘John Smith’ (Charles Coburn), passing himself off as a painter, offers a layman’s handy thumbnail definition of the movement, by declaring that Surrealism is an art form that expresses not what one sees but what one feels. In Written on the Wind, the reception area and corridor combine cool and vibrant colours, a pattern already discernible in the airport waiting-room scene where greys, browns and reds compete for attention. The grey-and-white patterned wallpaper and the mottled marble-topped receptionist’s desk clash with the corridor’s shocking pink as well as with the emerald green of the two tall rubber tree plants in the lobby and the female receptionist’s top. As she strains to see the bedroom allocations of the three guests, the receptionist’s curiosity is intriguing: is she a busybody or an advocate of free love? Poised to disapprove of the lovers, or to take vicarious pleasure from expected taboo-breaking bedroom arrangements? She is Sirk’s self-conscious representation of the Janus-faced 1950s audience, teased into deciding which way to look: backwards to a moralistic past, or forwards to an enlightened future. The pinks and greens are coloured pools of resistance to the drabness of the cooler shades. The appearance of the pink-lined corridor also contributes to the scene’s Surrealistic ambience, heightened even further later when, on discovering Lucy’s disappearance, Kyle sprints down the corridor looking for his vanished lady, the idealised woman capable of ending a cycle of futile brief sexual encounters with gold-diggers or celebrity-seekers such as those adorning his table at ‘21’. Kyle’s impulsive conversion of Lucy from transient conquest to fantasy wife, however, provides further proof of an unstable mind. Is he drawn to her intelligence, her reserve, or ‘decency’? ‘Lucy, are you decent?’, he asks when seeking her out in her bedroom that evening, the adjective’s ambiguity striking him only after he becomes aware of her flight from his enchantment. He may also be seduced by her aura of discipline, projected through Bacall’s slimline figure that

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suggests self-control as well as chic. The watery setting of the hotel and the oneiric, shocking-pink-lined passage invite speculation on notions of rebirth, of intrauterine memory and of a motherless son’s search for an absent mother. Shades of pink are later also used for Marylee’s chiffon scarf and dress at the Cove bar, a negligee worn by her in a later scene and for Lucy’s outfit at the very end of the film, as components of the film’s intricate figurative patterns of sexual desire. As she looks out of the window at the end of the film to witness the departure of Mitch and Lucy from the Hadley mansion, a colour previously linked with Marylee, and now uncharacteristically worn for the first time by her rival, offers final proof that Lucy has taken the place in Mitch’s life that Marylee had felt was rightfully hers. This progression via colour recalls Truffaut’s formulation. When Lucy, Kyle and Mitch arrive at the hotel, they emerge, with an employee, as if from a mirror. Many have echoed Sirk’s own repeated references to the profusion of mirrors in his films (Sirk in Halliday 1971: 48; Haskell 1987: 272; González Requena 2007: 177–205). Written on the Wind conforms to type, the whole film seemingly taking its audience on an uninterrupted ride through a hall of mirrors. In almost every setting, mirrors appear as distancing Kyle’s sprint down the hotel corridor

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devices, mute witnesses to characters and action, emphasising the two-dimensionality of identity, skewing perspective or forcing a character to confront the self, as when, after his assault on Marylee, and full of self-loathing, Kyle hurls his glass of grog at his own reflection. In the hotel lobby scene, the mirror at one point seems like a kind of portal, a gateway allowing the characters to abandon one world for another.

The portal of mirrors; Lucy, Mitch and Kyle through the looking glass

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The nameless employee is their guide, not just to the sybaritic ambience of the luxury hotel but also, like Alice in the looking glass, to a domain of unruly, topsy-turvy desires, here significantly presided over by a statue of Cupid and Psyche opportunely positioned at one end of the corridor. Beyond their psychoanalytical resonances that accord with Hollywood’s post-war fascination with Freud, the hotel scenes have a naturally more prosaic primary significance. Less a Rockefeller – defined as such by one of his ‘21’ glamour girls – Kyle would have reminded contemporary audiences through his profligate behaviour of real-life playboys like Jimmy Donahue, the heir to the Woolworth fortune. He has brought Lucy here to ‘have fun’, as he puts it; and, when challenged to own up to his real designs, answers ‘guilty as charged’. Kyle is indeed guilty of resembling Barbara Ehrenreich’s (1983) ‘gray flannel dissidents’ in flight from commitment but, beyond his hitherto throwaway treatment of women, someone whose whole life is characterised by self-blame, above all for not earning the approval of his father. Left alone in her hotel suite, Lucy realises what is expected of her. Not prepared for sexual martyrdom as the price of ephemeral material rewards, she wanders past the double bed, looks with a mixture of distaste and resignation in its direction, and flings her black gloves and bag – the synecdoches of her virtue – on the counterpane, before heading for the balcony, probably to contemplate the perils of submission to a fate worse than death. For all his seductive ‘good talk’ in the ‘Blue’ – ‘Something’s happening to me. I’m talking to you like I’ve never talked to anyone before, not even Mitch,’ he had confessed to Lucy – Kyle reverts to type on the ground, where, again buffeted by contradictory impulses, he attempts to treat her as just another sexual conquest. Like the flyers in The Tarnished Angels, a character’s true feelings find expression when removed from the pressures of ordinary life on the ground, or what Kyle calls the big poker table from Maine to California, where living up to his reputation as a playboy conditions

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every move he makes, where – like many men struggling to conform to revered standards of masculinity – he feels under pressure to maintain his persona. In his cups, as well as in the ‘Blue’, Kyle is capable of self-awareness. Later, at the country club, traumatised by Dr Cochrane’s diagnosis of his weak potency, he mangles Keats in a reference to his own predicament: ‘a toast to beauty and truth, which is anything but The synecdoches of Lucy’s virtue; contemplating a fate worse than death

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beautiful’. As Kyle and Lucy grow closer to each other during the flight to Miami Beach, the sunset unfurls its blood-red light on Kyle’s face. A courtship romantic comedy might have ended here, with the united lovers setting off on their life together: Time was when the hero and heroine of a mini-reel feature rode off into the sunset. The popularity of the ending has never failed. Sometimes the glamor boy and glamor girl did it on the same horse. With a nod towards progress, Universal-International puts a new switch on the old formula in Written on the Wind. There is still a sunset but Robert Stack and Lauren Bacall fly into it in Stack’s private DC 3. (Anon 1956 e)

But melodrama, the underside of romantic comedy, asks: what happened next? After the Miami Beach honeymoon idyll, in Written on the Wind, as in Sirk’s family comedy No Room for the Groom (1951), married life, for different reasons, turns out to be an infernal captivity, something hinted at in the former by the sunset colours on Kyle’s face. A change of tactics succeeds where the attempt to win Lucy over through luxury gifts had failed. Kyle’s promise to undo his The sunset colours Kyle’s profile in the ‘Blue’

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clumsy attempts at seduction – by ‘throwing my money at you’ – by pleading for an opportunity to woo her like any ‘Tom, Dick and Harry’ ensures that unacknowledged protective feelings more than sympathy or compassion, competing with the lure of a more adventurous, more glamorous alternative to her life as a secretary, override Lucy’s decision to leave Miami on the first available flight back to New York. ‘When does this hooky-playing come to an end?’, she had asked Mitch in the airport lounge. Needing from her the assurance of his own worth and relief from abject loneliness, like a little boy lost, Kyle opens himself up to Lucy and delivers one of the film’s ripest lines, exclaiming that he is ‘sorry, sorrier than I’ve ever been in my whole sorry life’. His offer of marriage comes soon after this remark and, after an awkward, tentative kiss, looking more concerned than joyful, more protective than sexually aroused, Lucy responds with another. In Written on the Wind, as in All That Heaven Allows, because a woman’s sexual attraction to a man to some extent involves the stirrings of maternal instinct, she may be positioned ideologically as a target for male resentment (Mulvey 1977–8). But, as with Cary’s (Jane Wyman) in All That Heaven Allows, Lucy’s motives in Written on the Wind are varied and her ideological meanings ambiguous. Cary’s relationship to Ron (Rock Hudson) at the end of All That Heaven Allows, as she prepares to nurse him back to health, is unlikely to be free of the sorts of hesitations and prejudices that led her earlier to break off the relationship, while in Written on the Wind Lucy’s maternal instincts are complicated by the promise of an adventure-filled life as a Hadley. At the very least, Kyle’s entry in her life allows Lucy to relax her self-discipline, even if the onslaught of feelings seems to fall short of the reckless abandon of an overwhelming passion. The complexities of Lucy’s seduction by Kyle reverberate even further as the shots of their reconciliation at the airport are followed by a scene at the Miami Beach hotel, where the newly-weds are glimpsed in bed spending the first night of their honeymoon. The mise en scène of night, and the reflected images of the ocean

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on the glass doors of their suite, warns of uncertainties ahead, even before Lucy’s discovery under his pillow of Kyle’s pistol – ready for aim at intruders, his family, Mitch or himself? – used as ironic commentary on its owner’s flawed virility. A neat link between a shot of the pistol held by Lucy at the end of this scene and one of the twenty-one-storey Hadley building – referred to in studio publicity as ‘balm to the ego of an oil tycoon’ (Anon n.d. i) – which immediately follows it hyperbolises the phallic significance of pistol and building, the former a small object that diminishes Kyle’s potency, the latter a monument to Jasper’s undisputed authority, both visual statements on the crisis of 1950s masculinity. The House of Hadley Precursors to TV dynasties such as the Carringtons in Dynasty (ABC, 1981–9) or the Ewings in Dallas (CBS, 1978–91), the Hadleys differ very little in their history of family warfare from the members of classical Greek tragedy’s House of Atreus. Here, too, sacrifices in the name of perpetuating the family lead only to tragedy. A significant difference, however, between the House of Hadley and its classical progenitor, or for that matter its TV legacy, is the absence of a mother. If, as Estela Welldon (2009: 167–8) has argued, breaking into a house may be regarded as an assault on the womb, the house in Written on the Wind – violated by the wind (a common symbol of virility, personified by Boreas the wind-god) and by the wild behaviour of split characters – seems additionally like an abused maternal space. The house cries out for a maternal presence but, in thwarting an opportunity for the reinstatement of motherhood in the Hadley household through Lucy’s miscarriage, Written on the Wind reinforces a pattern in Sirk’s films of the absent or missing parent, and seems to open up, especially if account is taken of the pointed excision of the mother (prominent in the novel), contemporary questions about fears of ‘momism’. Invented by Philip Wylie in 1942, the term refers to an overvaluation of motherhood that leads to failures by children to develop healthy, independent

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lives (Chafe 1974: 201). But, left in Jasper’s hands alone, the Hadley household self-destructs. In Sirk’s films, mothers per se are not axiomatically a panacea for family ills. In the comedy No Room for the Groom, Mrs Kingshead (Spring Byington) is a reductio ad absurdum of the selfish mother, and Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) in Imitation of Life is hardly a paragon of good sense and judgment, though Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore) in the same film, and Evelyn Warren (Linda Darnell) in The Lady Pays Off (1951), the woman persuaded to overcome her aversion to motherhood, might be said to embody those qualities. Lucy first meets the widowed Jasper not at home but at the office, although his enquiries about her impressions of the house emphasise the importance of dynasty. When, much later in the film, Mitch informs Lucy that he has tired of the Hadleys, her reply ‘I am a Hadley’ indicates, even in trying circumstances, respect for the family ideal. Jasper is a filter for a number of Sirk’s interrelated observations on class and psychology. Robert Keith’s frail physique, drained features and unimpressive height, standing only as tall as Lauren Bacall (5′ 8″) when seen in medium-shot profile, as well as his hesitant dialogue (‘Does he still …? Well, I’d better not ask about that’), ironise his status as a hegemonic patriarch, whose friendship with the local Daniel Boone (Mitch’s dad), combined with frustrated expectations of his own son, had led to the ‘anxieties and fears’, as Lucy calls them, of Kyle’s condition. From some points of view, and on the basis of his economic standing, Jasper epitomises the ‘power elite’. He is a member of the top social stratum, surrounded by the trappings of luxurious living, the importance of his family honoured through the naming of the town after it. He combines psychological delineation with social significance. While, as a father, he has lost all awareness of his children’s predicaments, as an oil tycoon, and judged only by economic standards, he is an American success story, a screen representation of 1950s magnates overseeing the merger of major

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corporations, the ten largest of which were in car manufacturing and oil (Exxon, Mobil and Texaco) (Norton et al. 1994: 927). However, he is also the film’s personification of the difficulties of merging two ideas of America. The inclusion in the Hadley family of the pioneering throwback, Hoak Wayne’s poor son Mitch, ends as a failed experiment in the attempt to transmit to the privileged younger generation the values of a forgotten America rushing towards ever increasing industrialisation and consumerism. The family home has additionally become not what, in a general discussion of the house, Bachelard (1969: 6) calls a ‘shelter’, a place of daydreaming that protects the dreamer, but a site of anguish and frustration, a constant memory of failure, trauma, lost illusions and death. The void of the vast entrance hall into which the leaves blow indicates a world where nature has died. Jasper’s flawed social engineering is matched by his hollow achievements as a tycoon. He is one of a breed of 1950s workdefined patriarchs whose business aims are accomplished at the expense of their children’s neglect, another Mr Hopkins (Fredric March), whose devotion in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956) to his work has resulted in estrangement from his wife and daughter. Mr Hopkins informs Tom Rath (Gregory Peck) that big business is not built up by ‘9-to-5 men’, but by men who dedicate their lives to it. Despite the endless promptings of his wife (Jennifer Jones) for Tom to climb up the greasy pole of career, above all to afford the expense of living in a more spacious, smarter house, they both finally realise, perhaps in common with the victims of many broken homes throughout America, that the struggle – if it means the disruption of the family – is not worth it. And that is the great contradiction of the decade. On the one hand, the celebration of family life spawned TV utopian situation comedies like Leave It to Beaver (1957–63) where, as David Halberstam puts it, ‘TV portrayed a wonderfully aseptic world of idealised homes in an idealised, unflawed America. There were no economic crises, no class divisions or resentments, few if any

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minority characters’ (Halberstam 1994: 508). On the other hand, of course, this was the age of the ‘acquisitive society’ and its ‘status seekers’, which naturally meant in the real world, as opposed to its idealised TV versions, family sacrifices in the higher-earning income brackets on the altar of materialist ‘success’.

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4 Dorothy Malone/Marylee: ‘Enough devil in her …’ While mise en scène provides the spatial context, characters drive the narrative forward. Their construction, as Murray Smith (1995) argues, is a dynamic process in which the person schema and cultural models allow us to keep ahead of what we are given and to form expectations. A mixed response is demanded by Sirk’s characters: close emotional involvement coupled with a reverse movement of detachment, what in a discussion of modernist art José Ortega y Gasset (1952) called the necessary process of ‘dehumanisation’ that through distance brings clarity to understanding. In film, of course, no consideration of character would be complete without attention to the contextual determinants and the fusion of star with character to mediate notions of selfhood, the relations between the sexes, social and national values. In films since 1943, Dorothy Malone graduated from small good-girl parts (often in Westerns) to more prominent ones,

‘I’ll have you, marriage or no marriage!’

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especially after being reborn as a blonde in Young at Heart (1954). Perhaps her most striking early appearance was as the forward ACME bookshop sales assistant in The Big Sleep (1946), the first of two shared credits with Lauren Bacall. While, under Sirk’s direction, Malone as Marylee (though not as Laverne Shumann in The Tarnished Angels) rarely modifies her bravura kinetics, Hawks preferred a cooler style. Restless facial and body movements indicate Marylee’s insecurity as well as anxiety. Her tiny but memorable cameo in the The Big Sleep, deprived of the psychological mayhem that provokes Marylee’s transgressions, needs no parallel demonstration of unhappiness. Intrigued by Bogart’s Philip Marlowe, the sales assistant takes the initiative and invites him indoors to shelter from the rain. A budding Marylee, the sales assistant is a sexual predator. At Marlowe’s suggestion she removes her owlish spectacles, and, her long dark hair now loosened to demonstrate sexual appetite, elicits from her admirer a louche ‘Hello!’ worthy almost of the British master of screen innuendo, Leslie Phillips. Malone’s beautiful vignette of underplayed but powerful, sexually charged acting proves that Marylee’s coloratura performance is clearly not her only suit. Either, implausibly, Sirk failed to control her, or else he encouraged her to emote and used her overstated playing as another of the film’s distancing, kabuki-inspired expressive techniques, opening up for the audience further access to Marylee’s troubled emotions, showing how through the destructive force of a frustrated passion she is being pushed ever closer to the edge. Hawks’s bookshop siren highlights salient features of the Dorothy Malone persona: a blend of intelligence, healthy, athletic all-American Southern charm and sultriness, attributes promoted in studio publicity: As brainy as she is beautiful, she won a city-wide essay contest while in the 6th grade, was choir leader at school, gave monologues and played leads in many school productions, and was salutatorian of her class and gave the graduation speech. Her high school record was equally brilliant, both

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scholastically and athletically. She was, for example, president of the Latin club … Dorothy was a top athlete as well, for she was captain of the basketball team, and won many cups and blue ribbons in swimming and diving meets for the Dallas Athletic Club. (Anon 1956 d)

Her minor part as Cole Porter’s fresh-faced cousin in Night and Day (1946) plays up the cheerleader aspect of her persona, while her sultriness, fully exploited in The Big Sleep, and more clearly on view again in Battle Cry (1955) and Pillars of the Sky (1956), prepares the ground for Written on the Wind. In Battle Cry, Dorothy Malone (reverting temporarily to a brunette) plays a wife who finds provisional solace in the arms of a young conscript (Tab Hunter), taking the initiative by suggesting they go on a hay ride, and ignoring 1950s codes of female etiquette – ‘I shouldn’t smoke on the street’ – before allowing her young lover to kiss her. As well as by creating a sexual frisson through cradlesnatching adultery, Malone is required to disrobe for a swimming pool scene with Hunter. When asked whether she was deliberately shot in a way to suggest she was naked, Raoul Walsh replied, ‘Yes, and after that scene she got a seven-year contract and I advised her “Undress as often as possible”’ (Walsh in Eyquem et al. 1974: 38). When Malone emerges from her bedroom, her black one-piece bathing suit is a forerunner of her black lingerie in Written on the Wind, both items of clothing intimating wickedness. In Artists and Models (1955), she emerges from a shower draped in a pink towel to stand in full view for what seems like an eternity. In Pillars of the Sky, and by now blonde again, sex – adultery, once more – still defines her, this time as an unhappily married woman who shares clinches with a former admirer (Jeff Chandler): ‘Oh Emmet, how long must we go on punishing each other?’ she wonders, in the trademark half-hushed tones of Marylee, her sentences invariably ending on a downbeat. Sex and adultery continued to be highlights of a career stretching from her woman-witha-past in that hotbed of small-town sex, Peyton Place, to her last role, as the enigmatic axe-murderess in Basic Instinct (1992).

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Hedda Hopper (1956: n.p.) extolled the ‘intriguing personality … flamboyantly lovely, a radiant, sun-tanned athletic type with startling blue eyes’ of a star who informed her that ‘when I made up my mind to go for bad, bold girls, I went blonde’. Malone joined a band of occasional bad blondes: for instance, Virginia Mayo, Lana Turner and Mamie Van Doren, the opposites of the good blonde temptress, epitomised in most of their films by Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly. Turning ash-blonde was clearly as much a career choice as a personal desire for a different look. Like her Written on the Wind clinging silver and black ball gowns, black underwear, scarlet negligee and the multi-coloured rustic-style top and jeans, Malone’s coiffure and hair colouring provided opportunities for disruption and resistance. As Elizabeth Wilson puts it, fashion ‘in our culture is elaborate, fetishised, neurotic, because it goes against these dominant values, against the grain of the cultural norm, representing the return of the repressed and the profound importance of the superficial’ (Wilson 1990: 38). Gentlemen may prefer blondes, but peroxide, like the dramatic costumes she wears, is part of an armoury of self-assertion for the forceful Sirkian heroine. As Marylee, Dorothy Malone resembles some of Hitchcock’s headstrong Nordic goddesses who, beyond gratifying their director’s delight in the mystery of beautiful women, take initiatives, assume responsibility for their actions and often know too much for their men. Dorothy Malone possesses little of the tender, romantic aura of Ingrid Bergman, but all of her daring and mischief, and none of the strange, high-browed pallor of Tippi Hedren, or Grace Kelly’s icy fire. Her bursts of uncontrolled feeling are not those of the sophisticated European-surrogate, but of the earthy glamour of the grits and black-eyed peas Southerner born and raised deep in the heart of Texas. When she appears dressed, now not in her glamorous, flamboyant or otherwise colourful costumes, but in the business grey of her newly assumed duties, no affirmation of dynastic commitments at the end of Written on the Wind is needed to

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advertise her credentials as a professional woman. The intelligence of the star fits the demands of the character. Sirk comments, ‘She has earthiness, depth and power. And she handles emotions beautifully. She has proved her ability to play routine sweet-girl characters, and now in this off-beat sexy role she is simply great …’ (Sirk in Allen n.d.: 3). These bad-girl aspects of the persona are referred to by Dorothy Malone herself: ‘Every time I play 1 [sic] toughie’, said the blonde charmer, ‘I think about all the female hellions I know. Then I think about all the fallen women of the great novels and make one composite character from real life and literature. On this one I model my picture portrayal. But I’m frank to admit that Marylee Hadley has me stumped. … Marylee is more cunning than Scarlett O’Hara, more ruthless than Lady Macbeth and more shameless than Zola’s Nana.’ (Anon n.d. e)

The mixing here of popular and cultured references, the allusions to Margaret Mitchell and, especially, to Shakespeare and Zola, seem not only like a nod to Sirk, the intellectual European in Hollywood, but also – whether or not these were the actual thoughts of Dorothy Malone – part of the studio’s defensive cover. In Written on the Wind, Marylee’s narcissism and thwarted passion are represented through dialogue and performance as well as through key aspects of mise en scène, including above all her private space, her bedroom shrine to Mitch. A glass-fronted display cabinet is stacked with bottles of expensive scent. Prominently placed Anthurium andraeanum plants – the poisonous and exotic origins of which hint at their owner’s complex identity – seem like offerings to a secular divinity, Mitch, whose framed photo occupies pride of place in this consecrated retreat. The plants’ protruding, fleshy leaves and flame-coloured elongated blooms are the appropriate insignia of the scarlet woman. Her blood-red negligee, like her flowers, playfully gestures to the tradition of nineteenth-century vampiric femmes fatales. Marylee’s room, with its erotic aura and setting for her

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Maenadic dance, seems designed to taunt the religious right, the Billy Grahams and Vincent Peales of the day. One of the film’s most vivid episodes follows the sequence of events that starts when Lucy, Kyle and Mitch return to the mansion after an evening at the country club and ends with Jasper’s fall down the staircase to his death on discovering that his daughter has been driven away from a motel after spending the evening with one of the local roustabouts. During this sequence, key scenes shot in Marylee’s bedroom serve as counterpoints to the action taking place elsewhere in the house. Sirk’s flair for exploiting all the resources of film language is given free rein. The atmosphere of approaching tragedy follows the arrival of Lucy and Mitch, who carries Kyle, so drunk he is incapable of making his own way home. At this stage both Lucy and Mitch show only concern for Kyle, Mitch acting like a brother, Lucy, ignoring Jasper’s renewed contempt for his son, informing her fatherin-law that she will try to ease his torment. Awareness of Jasper’s own failure as a father is sharpened not only by the pitiful sight of his dissolute son but also, and perhaps even more poignantly in the scene that follows Kyle’s mortifying return home, by the realisation that his Marylee dances with Mitch’s portrait

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daughter, in the words of her petrol-pump attendant date for the evening, is a ‘tramp’. Jasper’s ignorance of his daughter’s sluttish behaviour confirms the heavy price paid by prioritising work over family. His look of exhaustion maps the mental and physical demands of a life devoted to management, boardroom tussles and the challenges of on-site work in the oil fields. As the full impact of his children’s wrecked emotions begins to take effect, adding to the mental damage wrought by his many years as an oil magnate, as well as by the loss of a wife and brother, he grows steadily weaker, at first flopping into a chair, and then making his way up the staircase towards Marylee’s room, from where the blaring music sounds like a perverse requiem accompanying his final moments. Marylee’s earlier measured, self-conscious ascent of the Hadley mansion staircase, trailing her mink stole behind her like the scalp of the helpless male, Biff Miley, the petrol-pump attendant she had earlier in the evening trapped and devoured, follows in the footsteps, as the studio publicity department boasted, of, among others, Laura La Plante in Show Boat (1951), Myrna Loy in My Man Godfrey (1936), Olivia de Havilland in The Dark Mirror (1946) and Donna Jasper discovers his daughter is a tramp

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Reed in The Benny Goodman Story (1956), all of whom graced this hallowed piece of the Universal set. Once inside her bedroom, Marylee exchanges her figure-hugging champagne-coloured evening gown for a strawberry chiffon negligee, but not before stripping down to her black basque to remind everyone of darker ambitions. Marylee had already announced herself as the film’s would-be bride-in-black when taking to the floor in the black décolleté gown for her mambo dance at the Hadley mansion ball, a costume, however, for all Mitch’s compliments, no more successful in landing him than any other outfit worn at all other points in the film. Now she looks out from her upstairs window at the departure of her expendable petitioner of love, released, under orders from Mitch, from arrest for his indiscretion. Not one for pining in thought, she lights a cigarette and plays her record of ‘Temptation’ in a raucous, rumba version dominated by brass and percussion (Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed, 1933), the overture to one of the most brilliant sequences of 1950s melodrama. As Jasper struggles up the staircase, on his way to berate his errant daughter, the editing interrupts his weary steps with shots of Marylee framed intermittently against her bedroom’s roaring fire and Marylee trailing her mink stole

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the anthurium flowers and telephone, as ruby red as her aptly named 1953 Woodill Wildfire sports car. The sequence of alternating shots of Jasper and Marylee is accorded equal length. The scale of the images is also balanced, both medium shots, each initially lowangled, until Jasper reaches the top of the stairs, at which point the camera shifts its position to face him as he moves closer into the frame, before it focuses on his hand gripping the banister railing the moment he has the coronary that sends him reeling down the stairs. The billowing negligee, contorted into different shapes by Marylee’s kinetic limbs, spreads frenetically across the frame, at first denying the viewer a glimpse of her face, then revealing its ecstatic expression as she collapses into her chair, her feet still energetically moving in time with the relentless rhythm of the music to form the negligee’s amorphous, unstable visual hieroglyphs. Negligee, telephone, anthurium flowers and ‘Temptation’ provide the funeral rites for the death of a broken patriarch, who tumbles headlong down the staircase, mourned only by a daughter-in-law, shown in two shots in this sequence with horror etched on her face, and by Mitch, the son he would have liked to have called his own, who tends to him in the absence of the dying man’s natural offspring. The slow, agonised pace

Marylee’s solo dance

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of Jasper’s ascent contrasts with the wild gyrations of Marylee’s dance, but the combination of these matched shots places the characters within the same orbit, creating a disturbing pattern of images that expose the unruly desires beneath the composed and orderly veneer of a traumatised society Malone earned reviewers’ approval, only occasionally accused of ‘unforgivable over-acting’ (Boyd 1956): Although Miss Malone’s performance is exceptional, what the scriptwriters ask us to believe of her isn’t in all instances convincing. She’s made to be too black a villain. It is she, like Iago, who tells Othello (Stack) that Desdemona (Bacall) has been unfaithful to him with Hudson. (Bongard 1956: n.p.)

Despite its ultimately negative bias, the comparison between Marylee and Iago has some merit. The rivalry between Marylee and Kyle parallels those between Kyle and Mitch, and between Marylee and Lucy. Yet, Marylee’s hostility to Kyle is not as single-minded as Iago’s for Othello. Subjecting Kyle to the full range of contempt and humiliation, addressing him sarcastically as ‘the master’, her cruellest moment arrives when she accuses him of failing to notice the love affair developing under his nose between his wife and best friend, her treatment of her brother bearing out theories of sibling psychology that point to horizontal as well as vertical (parent/child) patterns in the construction of selfhood (Mitchell 2004). Like Mrs Kingshead in No Room for the Groom, comically indulging in secret femaleprohibited pleasures, she may well resent the privileges of gender enjoyed by her brother in 1950s American society. She may, more probably, feel piqued by exclusion on the grounds of sex from the allmale alcoholic or women-chasing adventures that have replaced the shared idyllic times of their gender-blind childhood. The triangle formed by Marylee, Mitch and Kyle carries overtones of a perverse counter-family where Marylee plays the sullen mother figure repelled by as well as concerned for Kyle, her surrogate child, eternally needing rescue by Mitch, the personification of the patriarchal law.

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And yet while, admittedly, most of the film shows Marylee ridiculing or railing against her brother, latent pathos and even love surface at the end when she refers to him in the courtroom where Mitch is under suspicion of his murder as ‘the sorriest of us all’. Marylee may be right about her brother – whose only comment about her had been that she had more devil in her than either himself or his Uncle Joe – but no one speaks at the end for Marylee. Her frustrated love for Mitch had driven her to what the studio promotional material, the censors and contemporary reviewers (e.g. Harford 1956) constantly referred to as her ‘nymphomania’, a condition that drives her to seek consolation with other men, to the dismay of her brother, sister-in-law and Mitch. ‘Nymphomania’, as Carol Groneman argues, a slippery term, constantly undergoing changes of meaning, was an easy label through which the studio could sensationalise the film. Having no medical basis, and largely ignored as a concept in psychoanalysis, it is perhaps best understood as a ‘metaphor that embodies the fantasies and fears, the anxieties and dangers connected to female sexuality through the ages’ (Groneman 2000: xxii). The focus on such fantasies and fears acquires even greater sharpness when one considers that, while ‘nymphomania’ enjoys common usage, ‘satyriasis’, the complementary term for men, is mostly conspicuous by its absence in everyday discourse. Marylee’s ‘nymphomania’ is readable against a background of pre-feminist, Playboy-promoted resistances to middle-American conformities of marriage, and of what must have seemed to many like the subsequently questionable shocking Kinsey Report revelations in Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female, published only three years before the release of Written on the Wind. Even if one applies the popular notion of nymphomania as a condition that drives women towards indiscriminate sexual activity, Marylee’s case hardly fits. Her fickle liaisons, racking up unsuitable partners, combine attention-seeking with self-harm, and are examples of what Estela Welldon defines, in a discussion of responses to rejection, as

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defence mechanisms: ‘Paradoxically, people often place themselves in painful life-threatening, masochistic situations to achieve psychological survival. Because of all the risks involved, doing so reassures them that they are still alive … [and it] avoids the dreaded black hole of depression’ (Welldon 2009: 154). Marylee manages loss through promiscuity, a form of self-harm that attracts the attention of the one person she cares about, and restricts her to a comfort zone that delays facing up to the reality of rejection. As Graham Music argues, Upset can be clung to, often with the belief that it is ‘better the devil you know’. Sticking to that with which we are familiar, even if it makes us unhappy, is at least safe and is often easier than risking change, and so also risking failing to be able to change and the consequent disappointment of such a failure. (Music 2001: 66)

Her suffering intensifies on the discovery of Mitch’s love for Lucy. Perhaps less an Iago, then, and more a Phèdre, she shares her classical precursor’s quandary, each tormented more by their object of desire’s passion for another woman than by any previous failures to respond to their overtures of love: ‘Hippolyte is in love but feels nothing for me/Aricie has his heart!/Aricie has his devotion!’ (Racine 1963: IV. v. 1203–4), cries out in anguish Marylee’s predecessor – if one substitutes Mitch and Lucy for Hippolyte and Aricie – her frantic sorrow prefiguring that of her 1950s heir in passionate torment.13 Marylee may be envious of Mitch’s relationship with Kyle. Undoubtedly jealous of Mitch’s love for Lucy, because she feels she has a claim on him, she is also envious of Lucy because of what Lucy means to Mitch. Haunted by a mixture of memories and regrets, Sirk’s portrait of obsessive love deserves more than her brother’s dismissive ‘devil in Marylee’ comment, her only tribute, a sorry contrast with the nobler assessment of Lucy, the woman through whom any lingering hopes over Mitch give way to certain despair.

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5 Lauren Bacall/Lucy: ‘A lady, a beautiful lady’ Lauren Bacall’s misgivings about involvement in what she and Humphrey Bogart considered a ‘soap opera’ have proved unfounded. Her reasons for overcoming her reservations included a blip in her career, a good cast and an attractive salary (Bacall 2005: 252). Despite, then, Bacall’s self-acknowledged decline on screen, Universal-International clearly felt casting her in Written on the Wind was a coup. The Bacall persona had undergone various transformations since her dramatic debut as ‘Slim’ in To Have and Have Not (1944). First a model making her name on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar (March 1943), and then an actress, her combination of striking, sylph-like beauty, dressed in narrow-waisted, hipemphasising outfits, and a performance style inspired by Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis (Bacall 2005: 17), made her a star whose name was indissolubly linked with the two films she made for Hawks – To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep – and thereafter, too, with her co-star on both these occasions, and future husband, Humphrey Bogart. The relationship with Bogart, for all the difference in age (Bogart was forty-five, Bacall twenty-two when they met), seemed on and off screen an even match. In The Big Sleep, she tells Marlowe to get his own drink, and adds, ‘People don’t talk to me like that!’ when she cuts short his stream of offhand witty belligerence. Bogart’s aura surrounds her even in films in which they weren’t paired, as if his roughness has rubbed off on her to the point where she sometimes seems to deliver her longer sentences, eliding the words uninterruptedly, in ways that echo Bogart’s speech patterns. Even without these resonances, her screen presence inevitably turns the audience’s mind to Bogart, and to their politically liberal allegiances. The link is given a self-conscious touch of humour in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), when the Bacall character

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attempts to convince William Powell of her attraction to older men by saying, ‘I’ve always liked older men. Look at Roosevelt, look at Churchill. Look at that old fella what’s his name in The African Queen. I’m absolutely crazy about him.’ The mixture of spare, slinky elegance, a dispassionate, hardboiled sense of humour in lines conveyed through an alto saxophone of a voice, all wrapped up in a persona giving the impression of inner steel, remained a model, undergoing shifts and adjustments over time, throughout her career. Her rounded vowels, low pitch, huskiness and clear delivery produce a slightly manly sound. In Young Man with a Horn (1950), when Richard (Kirk Douglas), the young trumpet player, meets Amy (Bacall) for the first time, his comment blends admiration for her intelligence with seduction by her voice: ‘I don’t understand a word you are saying but I love the sound of your voice. It’s got a rough spot in it.’ ‘Lauren Bacall’ (real name Betty Joan Perske) was Howard Hawks’s invention. ‘Lauren’, derived from ‘laurel’, the symbol of achievement, also puns with ‘law’, as in the ‘law’ of desire, or a ‘law unto herself’; while ‘Bacall’ (an Anglicised version of her mother’s surname ‘Bacal’) plays semantically with ‘calls’ of various kinds, and inspired the legendary columnist Walter Winchell to refer to her in one of his bylines as ‘Bacall of the Wild’ (Bacall 2005: 141). The pun is even self-consciously played up in Young Man with a Horn when, in reply to Amy’s (Bacall) command, ‘Call me some time!’, Richard (Kirk Douglas) replies, ‘Call you what?’ ‘Slim’ in name and in physique, the ‘Look’, as she is still being referred to in publicity for The Confidential Agent (1945), moves with feline grace, her sleepy azure eyes fixing her gaze from under emphatic eyebrows and a forehead slightly bowed in predatory concentration. In To Have and Have Not, leaning against Bogart’s hotel room door, dressed in a check suit with big shoulders, a handbag draped over an arm, beret in hand, and a cigarette protruding from her wide and full-rouged lips, her line – ‘Anybody got a match?’ – is delivered as if by a teasing, seductive wraith.

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Hawks’s view that a woman should imbue a scene with insolence (Bacall 2005: 96–7) became a feature of her performances, most strikingly the early ones; but even later on, when she sometimes played – as in Written on the Wind – more superficially conventional characters, his advice is followed. Her ‘masculine insolence’, coupled with a sense of humour and distinctive looks, provided the ‘uniqueness’ promoted by the studio: ‘[whereas] there is a sameness in the dramatic quality of most Hollywood glamor girls … Lauren Bacall remains unique in looks, sex appeal and dramatic interpretation. The why of this, if Miss Bacall would give us a clue, is feature material’ (Anon n.d. j). The same memo, acknowledging changing patterns in women’s lives in the 1950s, considered her appeal from another angle, highlighting her role as a professional woman: This is our big second picture in recent months in which the leading lady is a successful businesswoman … It is no longer true that in order to be intelligent and successful a woman must sacrifice her sex appeal. Lauren Bacall tells why this is so. The day of the beautiful dumb blonde is over. (Anon n.d. g)

In another studio memo, the suggestion is made that, as Rock Hudson’s new real-life leading lady was an executive secretary, ‘this would be a good springboard for a sound stage layout if and when Phyllis [Hudson’s wife] visits the set’ (Anon n.d. a). Lauren Bacall’s determination to do justice to Lucy led her to spend a week with an executive secretary whom she shadowed both in the office and at home, ‘to get a line on the private life of a bachelor business girl’ (Anon n.d. i). And yet, perhaps the casting of Lauren Bacall as Lucy may at first sight seem perverse. A role that, as Lucy confesses early in the film, includes a desire to get married, raise a family and live quietly in the suburbs seems incompatible with the dominant trends of Bacall’s career. Purely from the point of view of the domestic aspects of the

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role, Jean Arthur, June Allyson or Evelyn Keyes, the complaisant wives, respectively, in Shane (1953), The Glenn Miller Story and The Seven Year Itch (1955), might have been more plausible. Bacall’s persona led some contemporary reviewers to question her casting in Written on the Wind. In The Citizen News, Lowell E. Redelings commented: ‘Rock Hudson registers nicely enough, as does Miss Bacall in a part she doesn’t seem quite right for’ (Redelings 1956: n.p.). Len Boyd, on the other hand, wrote more approvingly that: ‘Lauren Bacall … retained her poise and charm amidst constant raves and rantings’ (Boyd 1956: n.p.), and David Bongard in the Los Angeles Herald and Express felt ‘Miss Bacall has never looked more engaging’ (Bongard 1956: n.p.). Lauren Bacall’s dominant screen characteristics initially seem unsuited to Lucy. Chosen for primarily box-office reasons, she was used by Sirk as an opportunity to explore the potential for contradiction, teasing out intricacy from superficial conformity, glossing some of the more submissive aspects of the roles given in the 1950s even to strong actresses like her. Woman’s World, for instance, made only two years before Written on the Wind, dramatises familiar 1950s tensions between the demands of public and private lives. Like Written on the Wind, the film is a catalogue of consumerist pleasures: sleek top-of-therange cars, chic clothes, accessories and luxurious settings. All are available to the woman whose man gets ahead in his career. But there’s the rub: following the boss’s advice to the aspiring executives – ‘Your wife must never compete with the company … your work must come first’ – invariably leads to casualties in marriage and family life. When one of the wives remarks that ‘it’s a man’s world’, Lauren Bacall is significantly chosen to refute the comment, although her view that it is a ‘woman’s world’ represents the film’s roundabout way of reinforcing a conservative message. Bacall is the raisonneuse or moralist of the film, through her compliance with a conservative ideology demonstrating that even strong, independent types are not immune from conformism.

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The film’s attitude to work applies even to the Bacall character, a fitter at Macy’s who gave up her job to be a wife and mother. In Written on the Wind, Lucy’s independence as an executive secretary is once again traded for marriage and a hoped-for family. The 1950s woman’s world to which her characters belong is one where public bows to private life. The point is all the more forcefully made in both films through the casting of Lauren Bacall, in the Negulesco version uncomplicatedly, in the Sirk, visually through recurring one-shots that emphasise her uncertainty, as an indirect critique of unequal choices. Bacall’s headstrong qualities admittedly emerge less obtrusively in Written on the Wind. Early scenes in the cab ride with Mitch, at ‘21’ and, especially, later on during Lucy’s brittle encounter with Marylee, draw on her reserves of poise and sharpness. Arguably, despite the softer nuances demanded by the role, her very presence in Written on the Wind is a statement of female authority. Opting for an actress with a more obliging on-screen track record would have unbalanced the film, giving too much leeway to Dorothy Malone’s Marylee. Their first encounter could be misconstrued as a concession to popular misogynistic notions of female spite. Sirk’s reluctance in Written on the Wind to seize an opportunity for a display of female solidarity – typified, for instance, by the relationship between Sister Mary Bonaventure and Valerie Carns in Thunder on the Hill (1951) – probably hinges on the need to give the audience an early impression of Marylee’s inner turmoil. Here, as elsewhere in the film, every fibre of Marylee’s being is shot through with feverish energy as she confronts the woman who will eventually rob her of the man she loves. Dressed in a white bathrobe, a towel draped over her shoulder to indicate emergence from a shower, Lucy enters her own bedroom to find it invaded by Marylee, no respecter of boundaries. Her shower scene has not survived in the released version of the film despite the publicity of Bacall’s presentation of an Oscar at the 1955

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ceremony to Fred Knoth, Head of the Universal-International Special Effects department, for his invention of an oil fog machine that eliminated the use of dangerous acids and harmful fumes. The machine was used for eight takes of Lauren Bacall’s shower scene, to cover bodily parts the Production Code Office would have considered censorable. She claimed that ‘this was the first time she had ever done a bathroom scene in which she didn’t almost choke to death’ (Anon n.d. h). In Designing Woman (1957), her fashionmodel’s figure is paraded in a lime-coloured bathing costume, but in Written on the Wind overt sexuality and a more explicit display of the body are reserved for Marylee. Thrown together now for the first time in the film, held in two-shot, both women have smiles on their faces: Lucy’s prompted perhaps by inconsistent comments about Marylee by Kyle and Jasper; Marylee’s by pleasure at catching Lucy off guard. The ensuing conversation becomes a struggle for supremacy, with Marylee aiming through speech and movements to get the upper hand over Lucy, seizing the initiative by speaking first – ‘I’m Marylee. Welcome to Hadley … sister-in-law’ – spurning Lucy’s overture of friendship – ‘nice of you to come in and greet me’ – through an uncongenial reply – ‘Oh please, I am allergic to politeness’ – and by dominating the space. From her initial position in a corner of the room, to her accosting of Lucy in the centre, to her momentary occupation of a chair at the opposite end, Marylee marks her territory in Lucy’s private quarters. She flops into a dark-pink upholstered chair and adopts a slovenly pose, raising her right leg to rest the foot on the seat of the chair, a drink in her right hand, her left draped casually on its arm, relishing her account of Kyle’s humiliation in the bar-room brawl: ‘You should have seen him; on the wrong end of every punch.’ The jibe draws a riposte delivered in a raised frosty half-tone: ‘And in the wrong end of town’, though quite where in Hadley’s spatial aesthetics the boundary lies between right and wrong is never easy to discover. The cut and thrust of their dialogue, however, unites as well as separates the two women, reprising the film’s patterns of doubles, as

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the sisters-in-law mirror the fraternal love–hate relationship between Mitch and Kyle. They are identified with each other not only now through family ties, and in this scene through mise en scène and colour-coding, but also through yet another of Sirk’s appeals to mirror imagery. As Lucy begins to brush her hair, Sirk cuts from a shot of Marylee to one of Lucy standing at the right of the frame and of Marylee caught in Lucy’s mirror. The viewer sees not Lucy but Marylee. At its simplest level, the ploy allows the two actresses to remain in shot during the conversation. The image recalls Dead of Night (1945), where in the film-within-the-film, The Haunted Mirror (Robert Hamer), the mirror reflects not what is really there but what is projected from the mind of a character. Marylee’s reflection in the mirror is no product of a disturbed mind, but an authorial prompt for connections between the two characters. Like Picasso’s Girl before a Mirror (1932), where the girl’s reflection is so different from the onlooker’s that it is effectively another person’s, the mirror imagery in Written on the Wind fuses, for a moment, two seemingly opposed characters. The reflection captures Marylee against the background of a hanging Chinese print in Lucy’s bedroom resembling those found in hers. There are flowers here, too, Marylee in the wrong end of town

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though unlike Marylee’s, white, not red. Even outside their mirror reflections, the two women duplicate each other’s gestures. Both touch their hair, and both are drawn even more tightly together as soon as Marylee begins her eulogy of Mitch: MARYLEE

What do you think of Mitch?

LUCY

You’ve changed the subject.

MARYLEE

Now there’s a man for you, or for me rather …

The shot of Lucy’s reflection additionally recalls paintings of women brushing their hair, looking at themselves in mirrors. In Rosetti’s Lady Lillith (1867), a poppy lies beside Lillith, a biblical vamp, here under the influence of opium. In Written on the Wind, the flowers are white roses and project, in contrast to the more colourful, full-blooded sexuality of Marylee, the inner radiance, or ‘lux’, of Lucy. Yet, the radiant heroine, for a moment, inherits some of her vampish forebears’ authority by answering Marylee’s final

‘I’m Marylee’; Marylee colonising Lucy’s space; seeing Marylee in Lucy’s mirror; ‘Pardon me if I seem to be brushing you out of my hair’

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barb about Kyle with a withering ‘Pardon me if I seem to be brushing you out of my hair.’ The constant touching of hair by the two is a minor feature of their mutual strategy of self-avowal. The mirror has fleetingly made no distinction between Marylee and Lucy. Just as, through her love of Mitch, Marylee shares some of Lucy’s finer qualities, so Lucy, through identification with Marylee via Mitch, is readable as someone ruled by wilder desires hidden beneath a cool exterior. The attraction of both women to Mitch (Marylee now, Lucy overtly only later) highlights shared ambitions. As the scene unfolds, their own private war is also a contest between rival forms of 1950s American womanhood: the professional northern woman, biding her time for suburban domesticity in the metropolis, versus the spoiled, reckless Southern heiress frittering away hers on cheap liquor and unworthy men. Softness, domesticity and consumerism, still yardsticks by which many judged female aspiration in the transitional 1950s, added to questionable decision-making, find room for expression in Lucy to create the ostensible conformist alternative to the wildfire antics of Marylee. Lauren Bacall’s masterful projection of these relatively unfamiliar attributes is never more poignant than in scenes where Lucy must cope with Kyle’s alcoholism and violence. Following Jasper’s funeral, she appears staring disconsolately out of Kyle’s bedroom window, as if searching for an escape route from a house of death. Sirk’s progression through colour-coding of Lucy’s predicaments, noted by Laura Mulvey (2001), is unmistakable. Although she later wears black – when the family and Mitch are at dinner on the night of her assault by Kyle – for this scene Lucy appears in pistachio green, the traditional colour not only of envy but also of hope, youth and fertility. The hoped-for discharge from the morbidity of the Hadley mansion is ironised by Lucy’s pregnancy, something confirmed shortly after this scene. She wanders away from the window to perch on Kyle’s bed, where he lies drunk. The maternal Lucy

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resurfaces here, tending to her infantilised husband, victim to an interrupted dependency on alcohol to appease deep-rooted anxieties and resentments. Lucy looks at Kyle, but his self-loathing – blaming his father’s death on himself and his sister – forces him to avoid Lucy’s look. Only her question ‘Do you love me?’ stirs him momentarily into meeting her gaze, before he turns away again, sinking his head in his Lucy ironically dressed in the colour of hope and fertility; Lucy attempts to comfort Kyle

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raised knees, and replies: ‘I don’t even love myself.’ Now Bacall’s face, alone in the shot, is engraved with concern touched with despair, free of anger or exasperation. She conveys the tenderness of a solicitous wife, her forehead creased with anxiety, as she inches towards Kyle, lays her arms across his shoulder, placing her hands on his back, to ask: ‘Kyle, what is it? Is it something I’ve said … or something I’ve done? Or should have done?’ The lines are in keeping with the sensitivity of a woman preferring to search for clues in her own behaviour before seeking blame elsewhere. Kyle’s reply, however, makes her begin to see the full extent of his misery: ‘Can’t tell you. I’m afraid. It’s like I was deep in a mountain pass, snow-caps hanging over my head. If I make a sound, snow might all come tumbling down, bury me.’ The absence of pronouns, definite articles and conjunctions in Kyle’s speech heightens the impression of regression to childhood. As the depths of what she had earlier referred to as his ‘torment’ dawn on her, Lucy begins to let go of Kyle, withdraws her hands, and distances herself a little from him as he plunges back under his bedclothes as if to re-enter his snow-capped nightmare. Realisation of her powerlessness to help him results not in a desperate attempt to cling to Kyle, or to sob over a broken relationship, but in dignified self-control and a calm withdrawal from a husband who seems beyond help. Emotional atrophy is expertly conveyed by an actress who had become by then a byword for resilience and strength of character, to some extent in Written on the Wind overshadowed by Dorothy Malone’s secular, conflicted Marylee/Mary Magdalene. Sirk balances Malone’s ‘melodramatic’ moments with Bacall’s quiet dignity. Her underplayed talent for tenderness is also called upon in the scene that builds up to Kyle’s assault. Sirk’s carefully developed crescendo, ending in a dramatic climax, can claim to be one of the high spots of 1950s Hollywood melodrama. Beginning with a couple of apparently light-hearted jokes made by Kyle that reveal hidden anxieties about his wife’s fidelity, the sequence ends with the brutality

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that the studio openly used as a selling point, drawing attention in a promotional campaign to other films where women were the victims of male violence, a phenomenon seemingly treated more cavalierly in the 1950s, but that would attract serious attention and condemnation in later decades. The list that the studio drew up was composed of: River of No Return (1954), Public Enemy (1931), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Pick up on South Street (1953) and Backlash (1956). While the studio seems to have treated the issue of domestic violence as an opportunity for sensationalist publicity, Kyle’s violence towards his sister, and subsequently towards his wife, inevitably raises questions about growing awareness of maleinstigated domestic violence in the country. Figures up to the 1960s are sketchy but, as Jill Theresa Messing argues: In the early history of the United States, many state laws and court rulings specifically approved of spousal abuse perpetrated against women … After the turn of the century the issue of intimate partner violence was largely ignored until the 1960s, when it became a focus of the second wave of feminism … Before the late 1970s, the issue of intimate partner violence was formally and informally privatized, that is, exempt from legal sanction because of the doctrine of family privacy. (Messing 2011: 157)

Male violence towards women, however, clearly concerned the Production Code censors, and the issue cannot be ruled out as part of Sirk’s undercurrent of interests in his treatment of the relations between the sexes. Not content with slapping Marylee in an earlier scene, Kyle ends up hitting – in deference to the censors’ objections to ‘kicking’ – his pregnant wife. The build-up to Kyle’s assault on Lucy begins with an ominous joke, mixing hostility with sexual innuendo, two of the three categories (the third is of the ‘innocent’ kind) referred to by Freud (1983) in a discussion of the purpose of jokes. Lucy’s plea to Kyle to leave the dining-room table and accompany her upstairs draws the following reply: ‘You wish to confess?’ He follows it with another, pausing before leaving the dining room only to tell

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Mitch, ‘Don’t leave the country!’ Compounding sex with the laws of religion (confession) and the state (leaving the country), Kyle’s jokes are the refuge of the revived and desperate libertine, his renewed alcoholism a sign of unconscious self-annihilation. Marylee, Lucy and Kyle are grouped together at the left of the frame, on one side of the dining table. At bottom right sits Mitch, the man accused by Marylee in an earlier scene of seducing Lucy, and at whom Kyle’s comments are aimed. Kyle and Lucy head upstairs, Lucy holding her unsteady husband, her face a picture of tangled emotions, mixing concern with long-suffering bewilderment. Sex obsession remains unabated, as Kyle fires another of his single-track-minded wisecracks: ‘Are you sure your husband is out of town?’ Lucy attempts to wrest control by imposing some characteristic Bacall discipline, sitting down and ordering Kyle to do likewise. About to raise a delicate matter, Lucy tempers authority with tact, as Bacall draws on deep reserves of skill to convey her character’s mixed emotions. In response to her opening remark – ‘Kyle, I went to see Dr Cochrane this morning’ – her hands now clasped together to demonstrate tension as well as determination, Sirk cuts to Kyle, whose expression changes as he retreats further ‘Don’t leave the country!’

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back into his chair, looks away from Lucy and downwards, withdrawing into himself, cowering like a marooned and guilty child. The expression of vulnerability is as poignant as when, following Dr Cochrane’s revelation that problems of conception were not down to Lucy, he declines Lucy’s invitation to take over from Mitch as her partner in the waltz at the Hadley ball by stating ‘somebody just stole my magical dancing slippers’. ‘Somebody just stole my magical dancing slippers’; Kyle believes he is incapable of fathering a child

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Denied the joys of fatherhood, he loses all interest in his roles as husband and family man, steps away from the dance of life and embraces the despair of solitude. Sensing trouble, Lucy continues, ‘I said the news was good’, affecting delight, her hands still knotted together to counter the optimism of words with the ambiguity of physical gesture. The tension between verbal and body language remains as Lucy now delivers what proves to be an explosive line – ‘We’re going to have a baby’ – her lowered eyes indicating a momentary crisis of confidence that prevents her from looking directly at Kyle. Sirk’s blocking of the characters emphasises the irreparable breakdown in their relationship. Lucy remains planted in her chair, maintaining characteristic Bacall composure, but Kyle, having earlier drawn away in his chair, now gets up and heads for the window, saying as he does so, ‘You mean … adopt one’, while Lucy, still seated, and determined to hold her ground psychologically as well as physically, replies, ‘No. No. Our baby’, delivered more as a plea. She adds, ‘yours and mine’, seemingly exhausted by the utterance of the phrase. Now the camera shifts its focus once more to Kyle, who has thrust his head through the open window – for air? or escape? – before dragging it inside again. The window – like the constellation of mirrors – acts as a framing device. Where mirrors often establish not only distance but also imprisonment, windows – as in the Expressionist dramas of Strindberg and Chekhov so familiar to Sirk – are potential gateways to freedom. Kyle’s clinging to the window expresses simultaneously a desperate need for escape – from the house, an unfaithful wife, Mitch’s shadow, himself – and the impossibility of release from what seems like an unavoidable destiny. Bursting now with venomous anger, so convinced of his own sterility – the ‘weakness’ Dr Cochrane had incorrectly diagnosed – he accuses Lucy of carrying Mitch’s child, while Lucy finally abandons her chair and, as she moves towards the camera, her expression in close-up registers disbelief crossed with horror.

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In this scene, Sirk paints a picture through Kyle of an individual so focused on his own inadequacies and inner troubles as to be unwilling or unable to listen to the words being spoken by another. Lucy’s appeal to Kyle – ‘Don’t say that, Kyle, don’t even think it’ – is made as she begins to retreat, the authority of her words now undermined by fear of physical danger. As Kyle develops his theme, hurling more accusations – ‘What did you think? Do you think I was just a drunken idiot? That I’d believe you?’ – further reaction shots are taken of Lucy’s face distorted by terror. When she protests her innocence, he rushes towards her and deals a powerful blow that knocks her shrieking to the floor. Slapped by John Wayne in Blood Alley (1955), Lauren Bacall repaid her aggressor the compliment. In Written on the Wind, she is denied the opportunity. Here, a chivalrous Texan, Mitch Wayne, comes to the defence of the woman he had described as a ‘lady, a real lady’ to the Miami hack in search of news of Kyle’s wedding, as Bacall is forced to take the more conventional role of a lady in distress. The film’s coupling of Mitch and Lucy at the end simultaneously marks the triumph of Mitch’s love for Lucy and, where once, through Kyle, she had opted for adventure and ‘Our baby … yours and mine’

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excitement, confirms Lucy’s settling for security and protection. The prospect of a suburban marriage with Mitch – once again trumping career-girl options – underlines the film’s awareness of the difficult choices faced by women. Not a confirmed career-girl, Sirk’s Lucy reflects the era’s ambiguous attitudes towards working women.

Kyle hits Lucy; ‘Take me away, Mitch! Take me out of this house!’

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6 Rock Hudson and Robert Stack: Cain and Abel The two key male roles went to Rock Hudson and Robert Stack, the latter a secondary star, the former converted into UniversalInternational’s top box-office property by Sirk, responsible ‘More than any other single person on the U-I scene … for Rock Hudson’s rise from bobby sox idol to prominence as a dramatic actor’ (Anon n.d. d). By the time of Written on the Wind, Robert Stack had already appeared in some lively films. Deanna Durbin’s love interest in First Love (1939) was followed by small but eye-catching roles such as the Nazi with a conscience in The Mortal Storm (1940) and Carole Lombard’s star-struck admirer in To Be or Not to Be (1942). Significant work in the cinema and TV around Written on the Wind includes The High and the Mighty (1954), Great Day in the Morning (1956) and the hugely successful TV series The Untouchables (ABC, 1959–63). In most of these, as well as in The Tarnished Angels, Stack plays complex characters, his performative masculinity masking anxiety. An athletic physique – played up in The Tarnished Angels when he is often seen shirtless – complements a punchy style of verbal delivery. Stack’s performance in Written on the Wind earned general approval, with one review singling him out over the other stars: ‘Stack Scores in Drama’ (Hamilton 1956), seemingly underlining Sirk’s comment that the secondary stars, Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone, and not Lauren Bacall and Rock Hudson, were the focal points of the film. Rock Hudson’s early career is distinguished by two phases: the eight films he made with Douglas Sirk and the romantic comedies where he was paired with Doris Day. Other early individual successes fell outside these categories – a melodrama like Giant (1956), and a Western like Gun Fury (1953) – but the Sirk and Doris Day films

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share an important feature that helps explain Hudson’s appeal: lightness of touch and a flair for comedy, showcased in the Sirk films, especially in Has Anybody Seen My Gal? and Captain Lightfoot (1954), and occasionally relied on even in the melodramas. Different audiences responded to Hudson according to individual tastes. Richard Dyer, for instance, claims Hudson was never really in his prime a gay pin-up, lacking both the troubled aura of a Montgomery Clift or a Marlon Brando, and the inflated pectorals of a Steve Reeves (Dyer 1993: 28–9). Perhaps Hudson’s appeal to women lay precisely in his seemingly steady, as opposed to tormented, persona, someone also clearly relaxed about an impressive physique not toned by pumping iron. As Richard Meyer argues, ‘Hudson’s masculinity is at once less aggressive and more eroticised than that of the conventional male hero of Hollywood film’ (Meyer 1991: 261). When, for instance, he is required to be bare-chested in Taza, Son of Cochise, his smooth, flat, faintly loose torso would have been attractive to some partly because of its aversion to the rigours of the parallel bars and other instruments of physical culture torture. Hudson’s posture and walk, epitomised by his somewhat slack midriff, express no tension – save perhaps on the dance floors of All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind and Pillow Talk (1959) – in marked contrast to the stiffer demeanour that outwardly expresses Robert Stack’s inner turmoil as Kyle. Hudson’s manliness, though, is incontestable: its blend of strength and delicacy, solidly balanced height (6 4 ) and a deep voice display the credentials of his masculinity. Throughout his career, though, he carries his air of virile authority lightly. The voice is gentle, often registering no higher than a hush, his fingers long and slender, and the head, with its wide and generous brow, on his skyscraper frame characterised by dainty, regular features and a generous endowment of jet black hair, makes him a sort of male Elizabeth Taylor (Babington and Evans 1989: 204). Even when involved in deceptions of various kinds, Hudson pursues his sexual quarries with tact and gentleness. There is, additionally, an overall impression of natural virtue that led Sirk to

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refer to his on-screen meanings as characterised by ‘straight goodness of heart and uncomplicated directness’ (Sirk in Halliday 1971: 112). In Battle Hymn (1956), he is a man of God; in Taza, Son of Cochise, he is the ‘good’ Indian. Like Cary Grant’s in the 1930s and 40s, Hudson’s legendary appeal to 1950s female audiences avoids the hard-sell of the big bad wolf amorous narcissist. In Written on the Wind, his charm as reliable object of desire is further illustrated by his work ethic. While Kyle is a playboy, Mitch is employed as a geologist. In Magnificent Obsession, Hudson’s character, Bob Merrick, actually abandons his ‘playboy’ lifestyle for training as a surgeon. As Talcott Parsons argues, the primary responsibility in any family for its support rests on one male adult member, and the ‘ “playboy” is not a highly respected type’ (Parsons 1982: 188). Hudson fits the role model of the respected male family member, his destiny at the end of Written on the Wind as he drives out of the Hadley mansion with Lucy. His clothes in Written on the Wind are appropriately conservative for the boardroom (suits and ties), but he dresses casually for work (cap, slacks and windbreaker) or relaxation (hunting gear with his father, sports clothes at the river). His code-switching between registers (as in his use of ‘pinch-hit’, a baseball term, in his first scene with Lucy) confirms his status as a man of the people, the perfect foil to Kyle Hadley, one of Sirk’s most turbulent studies of an industrial scion intent on self-ruin. Sirk’s films often feature sibling or neo-sibling relationships: key examples include All I Desire (1953), All That Heaven Allows, Imitation of Life and, especially, from the point of view of Written on the Wind, in its focus on brothers, Taza, Son of Cochise. The bitterness that marks the fraternal tensions between Taza (Hudson) and Naiche (Bart Roberts) prepares the ground for Written on the Wind. Kyle’s fatal encounter with Mitch towards the end of the film prompts a barrage of foul-mouthed accusations, repressed during a lifetime of love/hatred: ‘You lousy white trash! You no account two-faced dog. I’m gonna watch you cringe.

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Then I’ll put a bullet in your belly.’ To Mitch’s question ‘For what Kyle?’, Kyle replies: My best friend. My lifelong pal. What a laugh. You crawlin’ snake. You crept in here, sponged off us Hadleys, stole everything I ever wanted; everything I ever had. … You made me small in my father’s eyes you made my sister spit at me. Then you stole my life.

Kyle’s verbal assault, fixing on Mitch what must seem to him like unrecognisable reproachful eyes, follows his discovery in an inspired moment of ironic mise en scène of the gun hidden in one of the study bookshelves. Once the gun is in his hand, the crescendo of ‘melodramatic’ music comes to an abrupt halt, and the camera focuses at first on the two men in two-shot prior to isolating Kyle as he delivers his diatribe before Mitch is allowed to wander into the frame. The isolation of the outsider, Mitch, is emphasised when Marylee, having heard the commotion, enters the room and joins Kyle in a frame that includes the portrait of their father. This framing, like a mirror, momentarily underlining the precedence of blood over looser ties, however strongly felt, while also pointing to the ‘You lousy white trash!’

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underlying class prejudice that still marks a society priding itself on being ‘a land of opportunity’ for all. Social and psychological torment come sharply into focus as Sirk unlocks the pent-up frustrations of the damaged Hadley heir. Robert Stack’s twisted features and demented laughter, punctuating his deadly serious volley of insults as he aims the gun throughout the scene at Mitch, capture the inner turmoil of a man who has lost everything. Sirk demonstrates the extent to which the charmed lives of the two men had been built on the sands of class prejudice. Inferior in most other respects, a dishonourable or damaged man of higher social status if forced into a corner can always reach for this weapon. As Kyle’s rage bubbles over, his dishevelled air makes him pitiful, while Mitch’s characteristically unruffled, cool interjections are reminders that virtue is the true nobility. Yet, each is the other’s mirror. Kyle could do nothing to prevent his father’s introduction of a cuckoo in the Hadley nest, unable over the years, as he puts it to Lucy en route to Miami, to shake him off. Mitch’s reply, ‘It works both ways’, indicates that neither man has been capable, for different reasons, of breaking away. Friendship, when positive, entails mutuality, shared empathy, an ability to see things from another’s point of view, a freedom to act naturally, to be oneself with another person, to ignore differences of race, gender or class. Emerson defines friendship as a ‘paradox in nature’: ‘A sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me. My friend gives me entertainment without requiring me to stoop, or to lisp, or to mask myself’ (Emerson 1984: 117). Nevertheless, Freud’s claims that all emotional relations between individuals retain a ‘sediment of feelings of aversion and hostility’ and that, moreover, even what he terms ‘aim-inhibited love’ (i.e. friendship) ‘was originally fully sensual love, and … is so still in man’s unconscious’ (Freud 1985: 130, 292) seem relevant as an explanation for the underlying strained relations between Kyle and Mitch; and even though there is no indirect commentary on Hudson’s homosexuality, the homosocial tension is noticeable in various two-shots. The contradictory feelings become

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increasingly unmanageable as soon as the men turn their attention from each other towards the women they love. In Sirk’s mirror-laden world, the friends reflect each other, seeking mutual confirmation of identity: in Kyle’s case to negotiate his resentment as well as his admiration of Mitch; in Mitch’s to find equilibrium, social and psychological orientation to compensate both for his own father’s well-intentioned rejection by agreeing to his transfer to the Hadley household, and for his status there as an outsider. The goal of selfdefinition characterises the inner journey each has been making ever since being thrown together as children by their fathers. The identical attraction of Kyle and Mitch to the same woman represents a complementary narcissistic fantasy as much as a response to an objective reality. Mitch loves Lucy because he feels that, decorous, reserved, elegant, cool and self-controlled, she is like him. Mitch does not love Marylee (loving her only, as he says, ‘as a brother’), because, wild, garish, sexually uninhibited, she is unlike him. For all four characters, love is an individuating force, but in Kyle’s case, it represents additionally the possible means of triumph over his uncontrollable desires, and is readable as a sign of a perceived weakness in himself. In this respect, Kyle exemplifies Girard’s (2005) notion of mimetic desire. Kyle loves Lucy, as it were, through Mitch, valuing her because Mitch does so, still seeing himself in the mirror of Mitch’s desires. Once Marylee convinces him of his wife’s betrayal, his own sense of identity is shattered, his love of Mitch turns to fury, and the envy of his idealised other self destroys any residual finer feelings. Kyle’s tragedy is of the individual whose search for an identity has always been on a course to self-destruction, conditioned by a need to make choices and to undertake action eternally in response to the unshakable incubus in his life. In the scene of Kyle’s catastrophe, the petty revenges of envy that had been permeating his interactions with Mitch turn into the only option left to him: the destruction of the person who has, as he puts it, ‘stolen’ his life, his rightful legacy (his father’s love, his wife’s affections, even if not her body), in a final and self-defeating act of

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self-assertion. Kyle has been a victim of theft: like his imaginary magical dancing slippers, his whole life has been stolen, leaving him with the barren darkness of an unfulfilled existence. When asked in the courtroom about the identity of Kyle’s killer, Marylee replies, ‘Mitch Wayne’. The ambiguity of the remark combines a fleeting last-ditch vengeful attempt to frame Mitch with poignant awareness that his intrusion in Kyle’s life has provoked her brother’s ruin. Marylee’s testimony unsettles easy identifications between Kyle and Mitch and their biblical forebears, and the audience is left to make up its own mind, here as elsewhere: I have always been trusting my audience to have imagination. Otherwise they should stay out of the cinema. You have to leave something open. The moment you start preaching in a film, the moment you want to teach your audience, you’re making a bad film. (Sirk in Scorsese and Wilson 1997: 122–3)

Sirk’s analysis through Kyle – raging Cain or victimised Abel? – of the incoherent, unpredictable impulses of the human mind is masterly. Its foundations laid in childhood, Kyle’s identity develops through Jasper and his surrogate son Mitch

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the later effects of class, friendship and family experience. The spectacle of his pain invites us to consider and to try out explanations for the root causes of his unhappiness, to see truths to which characters themselves are blind. What Kyle has failed to notice ever since his impulsive marriage to Lucy the morning after their first meeting is that she has of course been Mitch’s true partner all along. Nowhere is this more movingly expressed than when the lovers agree to part on hearing the news of Lucy’s pregnancy. The film’s theme of suffering caused by love, most vividly captured in Marylee’s fruitless pursuit of Mitch, is no less sensitively represented in scenes depicting Mitch’s hidden longings for Lucy. His tightly wound self-control eventually begins to unravel when he informs his father of his decision to leave the country to avoid the increasingly unbearable proximity to the inaccessible married woman he loves. When he informs Lucy that self-disgust has led to this decision, the comment seems to apply equally to his own failure to overcome his feelings for her as much as to disapproval of Kyle. In a scene that shortly follows Jasper’s death, Lucy walks into the study and offers Mitch a cup of coffee. With a leaden heart, he greets her by saying, ‘You look ill’, a comment that underlines Sirk’s depiction of the Hadley home as a place of psychological and social malady. A sudden and uncharacteristic feeling of anxiety grips Lucy at Mitch’s impending departure, leading her to exclaim, ‘But I need you here.’ Torn between making a clear break and responding to her every whim, Mitch eventually capitulates and agrees – as Lucy regains her poise and asks him in her deep contralto – to escort her in his car to town. As the pair emerge from the house, now in significantly matching costume colours, they are observed from an upstairs window by Kyle and Marylee, who hails their exit with a tired musichall joke: ‘That was no lady, that was your wife!’ As a description of the Bacall persona, partially moulded on some of the unladylike characters she played (e.g. Slim in To Have and Have Not, or Vivian Rutledge in The Big Sleep), Marylee may

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have a point. But as a description of Lucy, its real impact, beyond Marylee’s mischief-making, is to show precisely how far ladylike instincts – until she is tested beyond endurance in the scene of her assault by Kyle – guide her behaviour in remaining both faithful to Kyle and respectful towards the Hadley name. By this time, Sirk’s tinder-box has been expertly prepared. It will go off on Lucy’s return from town with the news of her pregnancy. Before the explosion, Sirk inserts his touching scene of Mitch’s agonised declaration to Lucy: ‘I can’t keep holding back how I feel about you, Lucy. How I’ve felt ever since the first day we met. I’m in love with you.’ Mitch’s outpouring of love means that being so near and yet so distant from Lucy has been a simulacrum of living, not life itself. All through his confession, Rock Hudson’s face appears in close-shot at the right of the frame, with Bacall’s head seen from the back at the left. Marylee’s joke seems even wider of the mark as Lucy responds to Mitch’s passionate words and kiss by informing him that ‘To hell with the Hadleys!’; ‘I’m a Hadley’; ‘That was no lady, that was your wife!’; ‘I’ve never had him … and your wife has’

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Dr Cochrane’s diagnosis of Kyle’s ‘weakness’ was wrong, and, her mind by now a mare’s nest of contradictions, answers Mitch’s kiss with another on his lips ‘for goodbye’. The blow to any lingering hopes Mitch might have had comes immediately after this burning kiss of farewell. As Lucy relates through words and a facial expression edged with pain and regret the news of her pregnancy, the camera concentrates on Mitch, whose despair forces him to withdraw a little from her, to look down and away, the soft melancholic non-diegetic music of the title song underscoring his sorrow and confusion. These feelings, however, never threaten to overwhelm the softly spoken, even hushed masculine self-discipline – only abandoned in the attacks on Marylee’s bar-room lover and, after his assault on Lucy, on Kyle – so characteristic of Rock Hudson’s playing of Mitch throughout the film. If Marylee embodies the excesses of the Romantic agony, Mitch is the epitome of classical restraint. Suffering, caused by tormented love, plunging Mitch into an ever deepening abyss of despair, is compounded by Lucy’s words ‘I’m going to have a baby’. They ring with finality, extinguishing for a man of honour all glimmer of potential, and any prospect of a more ‘That was for goodbye’

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intimate relationship with Lucy. The torment of that knowledge is no doubt intensified by the thought of her intimacy with a rival, as if the pregnancy were final proof of the sexual bonds that have tied Lucy and Kyle together. Before the scene reaches its climax, there is a moment when, not yet privy to Lucy’s bombshell news, Mitch replies, with characteristic fellow-feeling – ‘Poor guy!’ – on discovering that Kyle’s supposed ‘weakness’ lies behind his renewed alcoholism. Like Marylee’s description of Kyle at the trial as the ‘sorriest of us all’, Mitch’s comment belongs to the film’s pattern of self-conscious exploration of audience response. His empathy with Kyle, or in line with what in a general discussion of identification with characters in film and fiction Murray Smith (1995) calls ‘engagement’, or ‘a structure of sympathy’, crystallises the real audience’s shifting ‘recognition, alignment and allegiance’ with the characters of Written on the Wind. Mitch, the audience’s surrogate, mirrors the ebb and flow of our own dynamics of response.

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Coda: The River In the immediate environment of Hadley, relief from the claustrophobia of the home is available through the motel, the Cove roadside bar, the country club, the diner, where Kyle meets Dr Cochrane to hear the news of his ‘weakness’ – followed by his agonised glare at the little boy riding the rocking horse outside, a sight never to be granted him by a son of his own – and the river. The first three are largely class-defined places of leisure. A little like Kyle’s ‘Blue’, the river is a natural setting for epiphanies of selfhood, while the diner is here, additionally, a place of false revelation, where Dr Cochrane’s diagnosis leads to Kyle’s resumption of alcoholic selfdestruction. The motel, bar, country club and diner, like ‘21’ and the Miami Beach hotel outside the Hadley geographical boundaries, are further examples of Ray Oldenburg’s ‘Third Space’, places for individuals to gather and spend pleasurable hours with one another, for apparently no specific purpose (Oldenburg 1999: ix), reminiscent in some ways of the American tavern which, as James M. Mayo (1998) argues, has been since its origins in the early 1800s a space that confers privileged social, economic and racial status on its members. In Written on the Wind, the country club conforms to this model. Wealth and privilege are on display, neatly capturing in the mise en scène the history of Texas, and its latter-day petro-dollar affluence: the club room bar commemorates the Lone Star State’s history with ‘Western’ paraphernalia decorating the walls; outside, the parked Sedan and restored stagecoach testify to modern prosperity. The discriminatory nature of the 1950s country club is emphatically reaffirmed through the absence of any minority-group Americans as members, seen only as bartenders, chauffeurs and porters. The flip side of the country club is the motel, ‘El Paraiso’, a no more than dingy paradise, and the Cove bar, offering cold beer and

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‘raw corn’, frequented by a popular clientele, each patronised by Kyle and Marylee to dull their incurable pain. A more beguiling source of comfort is provided by the river. Marylee and Kyle talk of returning to the river, and Marylee is twice seen there (once with Mitch). During such moments, Sirk himself seems to speak through his characters, paying homage to some of the writers who celebrated At the country club; Marylee and Mitch at the river

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another America (Halliday 1971: 101), such as Thoreau (mentioned in All That Heaven Allows), Willa Cather (acknowledged as ‘nostalgia in Nebraska’ in The Tarnished Angels) and others. Novels like Willa Cather’s My Antonia or H. L. Davis’s Honey in the Horn, where characters display enviable strengths in their battles for survival in the wilderness, earn special praise from Sirk. A nostalgic pastoralism, however, fails to distract him from defining the river as, additionally, a source of fugitive and unreliable memories of past childhood happiness. Hoak Wayne is, after all, an oxymoron of this idealised illusion: Hoak abandons his oak-like, natural, pioneering convictions by sending his son to grow up in the oil-rich Hadley home, his surname a pun on the waning of a pastoral ethos falsely embedded in his first name. One childhood incident, recalled by Kyle in his incoherent alcoholic ramblings, of letting Mitch take the blame for some stolen bottles, indicates that the past is far from the idyllic utopia of sibling memory. The river, then, is not only a boundary that separates past from present but also a modern Lethe, a Texan river of forgetfulness, the dark complement to its rivers of oil, in the present-day Hades, or Hadley, that holds Kyle, Marylee, Jasper and, provisionally, Mitch and Lucy captives in their gilded cage. Undeniably, though, Kyle’s last words to Mitch before dying – ‘Mitch, what are we doing here? Let’s go down to the river’ – are reminders that the trappings of wealth and privilege have emotionally retarded Kyle and Marylee, binding them together to a past of unfulfilled promise in an inferno not entirely of their own making. Kyle’s emphasis on waiting by the river – ‘I’ll be down at the river, waiting, waiting’ – confirms a life transfixed in time, unable to reach maturity. His appeal to the past, his wish to be returned there, exemplifies melodrama’s typically circular patterns. Unlike the Western, say, with its exteriorised action-dominated heroic resolutions, melodrama turns its gaze inwardly, typically towards the family. So, in Written on the Wind, the outsiders, Lucy and Mitch, are allowed to leave, but the bloodline family members – the patriarch, Jasper, the damaged siblings, Kyle and Marylee – remain locked in captivity, like

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the initials carved on the riverbank tree, immobilised by the dynastic constraints of their Hadley heritage, impeded from seeking renewal and the life-affirming energy of natural forces, and defined more by the stasis of an opulent but claustrophobic mansion than by the dynamic, elemental drive of the film’s key metaphor, the wind: Jasper and Kyle die, while Marylee inherits and prepares to run the family business. Repeating the Euripidean pattern, as Kyle and Jasper die, allowing Mitch and Marylee to live, though in each case sacrifice is characteristically veiled in irony, the film ends as it began, with Kyle’s reprised death, its trademark Sirkian narrative circularity mirroring the ways in which past and present are folded into each other. Sirk’s handling of time is masterful, epitomising Eliot’s words in Little Gidding, ‘What we call the beginning is often the end/And to make an end is to make a beginning’ (Eliot 1944: 200). Mitch may well have consigned, as he puts it, the Hadleys to hell, but he will probably never cast off their shadow, especially as the woman he loves and with whom he rides away once affirmed her pride in being one; Marylee reverses her destiny as a woman by taking responsibility for Hadley Oil, but will always be haunted by the memory of her unconsummated passion for Mitch.

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Synopsis After the credit title sequence showing Kyle’s drunken return home, a pistol shot is heard. A man (later discovered to be Kyle) emerges from the house, drops his pistol and collapses on the porch. The film rewinds a year in time to Mitch’s meeting Lucy at the Hadley New York office, followed by Kyle’s infatuation with her at ‘21’, a flight to Miami where he secretly marries her and dashes Mitch’s hopes of doing so. The narrative then switches to Hadley, Texas, where Lucy meets her father-in-law Jasper and sister-in-law Marylee, whose frustrated longings for Mitch – sent by his father to live ever since childhood with the Hadleys – lead her into relationships with various unsuitable admirers. Jasper dies, shocked to discover that his daughter is a tramp. Marylee goads Kyle into mistakenly believing Lucy is having an affair with Mitch. When Lucy informs Kyle, who is convinced he is sterile, they are going to have a baby, he accuses her of bearing Mitch’s child and hits her. Mitch comes to her rescue; Kyle threatens to shoot Mitch, but the gun is fired as Marylee tries to seize it. Kyle dies, and Mitch is accused of his murder. Marylee’s testimony acquits him, and she takes over the family business, while Lucy and Mitch drive away from the Hadley mansion.

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Notes 1 On perception, the ‘deictic’ function of eyes and related questions in Mannerism and Surrealism, see Caws (1981). 2 From poem LXX: ‘… sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti/in vento et rapida scriber oportet aqua’. 3 For a different view of the ending, see Christopher Orr (1980). 4 In the film, not a Thunderbird but an Allard J2X. 5 Its official release was January 1957. 6 E.g. by Mulvey (1977–8), Camper (1971), Elsaesser (1987), Nowell-Smith (1977), Walker (1982), Gledhill (ed.) (1987), Schatz (1981), Kleinhans (1978), Mercer and Shingler (2004), Kuhn (1984). 7 On irony in Sirk, see Babington and Evans (1990: 48–58). 8 For a detailed analysis of the mise en scène in Imitation of Life, see John Gibbs (2002: 83–96).

9 For Sirk’s views on Hamilton, see Halliday (1971: 79–80). 10 On film and literary secretaries, see Price and Thurschwell (2005). 11 A studio publicity memo reads, ‘Lauren Bacall (from what they say on wardrobe) apparently decided on a style of dress which she insists on regardless of the change in fashions’ (Anon n.d. f). Whether Sirk or Bacall had the last word over her wardrobe remains unclear. 12 The chic New York club was more than happy to have the publicity provided by this scene (Bergman 1955). 13 ‘Hippolyte est sensible, et ne sent rien pour moi!/Aricie a son coeur! Aricie a sa foi!’

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Credits Written on the Wind USA/1956 Directed by Douglas Sirk Produced by Albert Zugsmith Screenplay by George Zuckerman based on the novel by Robert Wilder Director of Photography Russell Metty Film Editor Russell F. Schoengarth Art Direction Alexander Golitzen Robert Clatworthy Music Frank Skinner © Universal Pictures Company, Inc. Production Company Universal-International presents a Universal-International picture [1st] Assistant Director William Holland Special Photography Clifford Stine Set Decorations Russell A. Gausman Julia Heron

Gowns [Costume Designer] Bill Thomas Make-up Bud Westmore Hairstylist Joan St Oegger Music Supervision by Joseph Gershenson Soundtrack song ‘Written on the Wind’; music: Victor Young; lyrics: Sammy Cahn, sung by The Four Aces Sound Leslie I. Carey Robert Pritchard Technicolor Colour Consultant William Fritzsche uncredited Unit Production Manager Norman Deming Co-ordinator Al Trosin 2nd Assistant Director Wilson Shyer Script Supervisor Betty Abbott Camera Operator Philip H. Lathrop Assistant Camera Ledge Haddow

Gaffer Max Nippell Best Boy Grip Edward Hobson Grips Dean Paup Kenny Smith Still Photographer Rollie Lane Property Master Robert Laszlo Costumes Jay A. Morley Jr Make-up Artists Nick Marcellino Del Armstrong Hairstylist Marie Walter Wardrobe Nevada Penn Claire Cramer Sound Recordist William Lambert Boom Operators Frank Gorback Donald L. Bolger Sound Editors Edward L. Sandlin Joseph Sikorski Dialogue Coach Richard Mayer

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CAST Rock Hudson Mitch Wayne Lauren Bacall Lucy Moore Hadley Robert Stack Kyle Hadley Dorothy Malone Marylee Hadley Robert Keith Jasper Hadley Grant Williams Biff Miley Robert J. Wilke Dan Willis Edward C. Platt Doctor Paul Cochrane Harry Shannon Hoak Wayne John Larch Roy Carter Joseph Granby Judge R. J. Courtney Roy Glenn Sam Maidie Norman Bertha William Schallert reporter Joanne Jordan brunette Dani Crayne blonde Dorothy Porter secretary

uncredited Jane Howard woman beer drinker Floyd Simmons man beer drinker Cynthia Patrick waitress Glen Kramer Phil Harvey college boys Coleen McClatchey Carlene King Johnson college girls Robert Brubaker hotel manager Bert Holland court clerk Don C. Harvey hotel doorman Carl Christian Bud Widom bartenders Gail Bonney hotel floorlady Paul Bradley maître d’ Joe Bailey state trooper Susan Odin voice of Marylee as a girl Robert Lyden voice of Kyle as a boy Robert Winans voice of Mitch as a boy

Robert Malcolm hotel proprietor Chester Jones attendant William O’Brien waiter Kevin Corcoran little boy in drugstore Filmed from 28 November 1955 to early January 1956 at Universal Studios (Universal City, California, USA). 35mm. Technicolor. Western Electric Recording. MPAA: 17032 US theatrical release by Universal Pictures on 25 December 1956. Running time: 99 minutes UK theatrical release by J. Arthur Rank Film Distributors circa October 1956. BBFC certificate A (passed with cuts) Credits compiled by Julian Grainger

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Bibliography NB: All the Anon UniversalInternational memos and publicity documents are located in the Sirk Collection, Cinematic Arts Library, University of Southern California. They are referenced alphabetically through the first few words of the quotation. Affron, Charles and Mirella Jona Affron. 1995. Sets in Motion: Art Direction and Film Narrative (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press). Allen, Don. N.d. ‘Dorothy Malone’, 13pp. Margaret Herrick Written on the Wind file. Anon. N.d. a. ‘Universal-International Campaign Ideas: “This would be …”’. ——. N.d. b. ‘Universal-International Production Notes: “A matured Hollywood has begun …”’. ——. N.d. c. ‘Universal-International Production Notes: “Expertness with romantic …”’. ——. N.d. d. ‘Universal-International Production Notes: “More than any other …”’. ——. N.d. e. ‘Universal-International Publicity Memo: “Every time I play …”’. ——. N.d. f. ‘Universal-International Publicity Memo: “Lauren Bacall (from what they say …)”’. ——. N.d. g. ‘Universal-International Publicity Memo: “This is our big second picture …”’. ——. N.d. h. ‘Universal-International Publicity Memo: “This was the first time …”’. ——. N.d. i. ‘Universal-International Publicity Memo: “To get a line …”’.

——. N.d. j. ‘Universal-International Publicity Memo: “[Whereas] there is a sameness …”’. ——. 1956 a. ‘Universal-International Publicity Memo: “Director Douglas Sirk, who thinks …”’, 19 March. ——. 1956 b. ‘Universal-International Studio Publicity: “What a Man Tells a Woman …”’, 15 August. ——. 1956 c. ‘Universal-International Studio Memo: “It was our feeling …”’, 4 October. ——. 1956 d. ‘Universal-International Dorothy Malone Biography’, 10 October. ——. 1956 e. ‘Universal-International Publicity Memo: “Time was when the hero …”’, 16 December. Babington, Bruce and Peter William Evans. 1989. Affairs to Remember: The Hollywood Comedy of the Sexes (Manchester: Manchester University Press). (Chapter 4: ‘The Fifties: A Meditation on Comedy in the Age of Conformity, via Pat and Mike, Rock and Doris, Wilder and Marilyn and Douglas Sirk’, pp. 179–266, especially section on Sirk, pp. 234–66.) ———. 1990. ‘All That Heaven Allowed – Another Look at Sirkian Irony’, Movie, vol. 34–5, Winter: 48–58. Bacall, Lauren. 2005. By Myself and Then Some (London: Headline). Bachelard, Gaston. 1969. The Poetics of Space (Boston, MA: Beacon Press). Baur, Jack. 1955. ‘UniversalInternational Studio Inter-office Communication to Joseph Dubin’, 9 November.

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Bergman, Maurice. 1955. ‘Telegram to Albert Zugsmith and William Gordon’, 7 November. Bongard, David. 1956. ‘Written on the Wind Is Lavish’, Los Angeles Herald and Express, 26 December. Bourget, Jean-Loup. 1977–8. ‘God Is Dead or through a Glass Darkly’, Bright Lights, Winter: 23–7. Boyd, Len. 1956. ‘Oscar Caliber’, Valley Times, 26 December. Breines, Wini. 1992. Young, White, and Miserable. Growing up Female in the Fifties (Boston, MA: Beacon Press). Camper, Fred. 1971. ‘The Films of Douglas Sirk’, Screen, vol. 12, Summer: 29–41. Cather, Willa. 2006 [1918]. My Antonia (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Catullus, Gaius Valerius. 1976 [1913]. The Poems of Gaius Valerius, translated by F. W. Cornish (London: William Heinemann). Caws, Mary Ann. 1981. The Eye in the Text: Essays on Perception, Mannerist to Modern (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Chafe, William Henry. 1974. The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles 1920–1970 (London, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). Dyer, Richard. 1993. ‘Rock – The Last Guy You’d Have Figured’, in Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumin (eds), You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies and Men (London: Lawrence and Wishart), pp. 27–34. Ehrenreich, Barbara. 1983. The Hearts of Men. American Dreams and the Flight

from Commitment (London: Pluto Press). Eliot, T. S. 1944 [1943]. The Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber). Elsaesser, Thomas. 1987. ‘Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama’, in Gledhill (ed.), Home Is Where the Heart Is, pp. 43–69. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1984 [1906]. Essays (London and Melbourne: Dent). Eyquem, Oliver, Michael Henry and Jacques Saada. 1974. ‘Interview with Raoul Walsh’, in Phil Hardy (ed.), Raoul Walsh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film Festival), pp. 31–49. Farnham, Marynia and Ferdinand Lundberg. 1947. The Lost Sex (New York: Harper). Fassbinder, Rainer Werner. 1972. ‘Six Films by Douglas Sirk’, in Laura Mulvey and Jon Halliday (eds), Douglas Sirk (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film Festival), pp. 95–107. Freud, Sigmund. 1983 [1905]. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, translated by James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin). ——. 1985. ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921)’, in Civilization, Society and Religion, translated by James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin), pp. 91–179. Gibbs, John. 2002. Mise-en-scène: Film Style and Interpretation (London and New York: Wallflower). Girard, R. 2005 [1988]. Violence and the Sacred (New York and London: Continuum).

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Gledhill, Christine (ed.). 1987. Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: British Film Institute). González Requena, Jesús. 2007. Douglas Sirk (Madrid: Cátedra). Groneman, Carol. 2000. Nymphomania: A History (New York: W. W. Norton). Halberstam, David. 1994. The Fifties (New York: Random House). Halliday, Jon. 1971. Sirk on Sirk (London: Secker & Warburg/BFI). Hamilton, Sara. 1956. ‘Stack Scores in Drama’, LA Examiner, 26 December. Harford, Margaret. 1956. ‘Judy Copes with Baby. “Wind” Emotional Drama’, Mirror News, 27 December, part 11: 9. Haskell, Molly. 1987. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press). Hopper, Hedda. 1956. ‘Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood’, Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine, 2 December: 36–40. Jones, Lou. 1956. ‘UniversalInternational Publicity Memo’, 19 January. Kleinhans, C. 1978. ‘Notes on Melodrama and the Family under Capitalism’, Film Reader, vol. 3: 40–7. Klinger, Barbara. 1994. Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture and the Films of Douglas Sirk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). Kuhn, Annette. 1984. ‘Women’s Genres’, Screen, vol. 25 no. 1: 18–28. Mayo, James M. 1998. The American Country Club: Its Origins and

Development (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press). Mercer, John and Martin Shingler. 2004. Melodrama: Genre, Style, Sensibility (London and New York: Wallflower). Messing, Jill Theresa. 2011. ‘The Social Control of Family Violence’, Journal of Women and Social Work, vol. 26 no. 2: 154–68. Meyer, Richard. 1991. ‘Rock Hudson’s Body’, in Diana Fuss (ed.), Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (London: Routledge), pp. 259–88. Mills, C. Wright. 1981 [1956]. The Power Elite (London, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). Mitchell, Juliet. 2004. Siblings (Cambridge: Polity). Mulvey, Laura. 1977–8. ‘Notes on Sirk and Melodrama’, Movie, vol. 25, Winter: 53–6. ——. 2001. ‘Liner Notes on Written on the Wind’, Criterion Collection DVD edition of Written on the Wind (ISBN 1-55940-913-4; catalogue number CC1566D). Music, Graham. 2001. Affect and Emotion (Cambridge: Icon Books). Neale, Steve. 2000. Genre and Hollywood (London and New York: Routledge). Norton, Mary Beth, David Katzman, Paul Escott, Howard Chudacoff, Thomas Paterson, William Tuttle. 1994. A History of the United States: A People and a Nation, 4th edition, Vol. II (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin). Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. 1977. ‘Minnelli and Melodrama’, Screen, vol. 18 no. 2: 113–19.

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Oldenburg, Ray. 1999. The Great Good Place (New York: Marlowe and Company). Orr, Christopher. 1980. ‘Closure and Containment: Marylee Hadley in Written on the Wind’, Wide Angle, vol. 4 no. 2: 28–35. Ortega y Gasset, José. 1952. The Dehumanization of Art and Other Writings on Art and Culture, translated by Willard R. Task (New York: Doubleday Anchor). Parsons, Talcott. 1982 [1955]. ‘The Isolated Conjugal Family’, in Michael Anderson (ed.), Sociology of the Family (Harmondsworth: Penguin), pp. 178–98. Price, Leah and Pamela Thurschwell (eds). 2005. Literary Secretaries/ Secretarial Culture (Aldershot, Hants., and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing). Racine, Jean. 1963 [1676]. Phèdre, edited by H. R. Roach (London: George Harrap). Redelings, Lowell E. 1956. ‘“Written on the Wind” Well Acted Film’, Citizen News, 26 December. Rosen, Charles. 2011. Music and Sentiment (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press). Schatz, Thomas. 1981. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking and the Studio System (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press). Scorsese, Martin and Michael Henry Wilson. 1997. A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies (London: Faber and Faber/BFI).

Shivas, Mark. 1979. Behind the Mirror: A Profile of Douglas Sirk. BBC documentary, included in extras of All That Heaven Allows DVD, Criterion Collection, 2001 (ISBN 1-55940-912-6; catalogue number CC1565D). Shurlock, Geoffrey M. 1955 a. ‘Memo to William Gordon’, 25 May. ——. 1955 b. ‘Letter to William Gordon’, 7 November. ——. 1955 c. ‘Letter to William Gordon’, 21 November. Smith, Murray. 1995. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Stern, Michael. 1977–8. ‘Interview with Douglas Sirk’, Bright Lights, Winter: 29–34. Tallack, Douglas. 1991. TwentiethCentury America: The Intellectual and Cultural Context (London and New York: Longman). Truffaut, François. 1978. The Films in My Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Vidal, Nuria. 1988. The Films of Pedro Almodóvar (Madrid: Instituto de la Cinematografía y las Artes Audiovisuales). Walker, Michael. 1982. ‘Melodrama and the American Cinema’, Movie, vol. 29–30, Summer: 2–38. Welldon, Estela. 2009. ‘Dancing with Death’, British Journal of Psychotherapy, vol. 25 no. 2, May: 149–82. Whitfield, Stephen J. 1991. The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press). Wilder, Robert. 1946 [1945]. Written on the Wind (London: Corgi Books).

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Wilson, Elizabeth. 1990. ‘All the Rage’, in Janet Gaines and Charlotte Herzog (eds), Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body (London: Routledge), pp. 28–38.

Zuckerman, George. 1955 a. First Draft Screenplay, Written on the Wind, 4 March. ——. 1955 b. Revised Final Screenplay, Written on the Wind, 11 November.

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